possible infection?

  • Thread starter Thread starter NCBill
  • Start date Start date
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NCBill

In the past few weeks, I have noticed that I have less and less
available memory on my hard drive. I run Norton Clean Sweep every day,
and it tells me how much free space there is on the drive. Usually, it
is slow, a few tens of megabytes lost every day. Today, in two
different runs, only an hour apart, Clean Sweep indicated I had lost a
half gig of space on my hard drive. I can find no new files by
searching with the Windows search routine. I use Norton Anti-Virus with
up to date definitions, and a weekly scan of the entire computer. The
last scan was 3 days ago. Does this sound like a virus? If so, what
could it be, and how would I get rid of it?
 
What O/S are you using?? Norton Utilities causes problems with WinME for
instance.

Heather
 
from the said:
In the past few weeks, I have noticed that I have less and less
available memory on my hard drive. I run Norton Clean Sweep every day,
and it tells me how much free space there is on the drive. Usually, it
is slow, a few tens of megabytes lost every day. Today, in two
different runs, only an hour apart, Clean Sweep indicated I had lost a
half gig of space on my hard drive. I can find no new files by
searching with the Windows search routine. I use Norton Anti-Virus
with up to date definitions, and a weekly scan of the entire computer.
The last scan was 3 days ago. Does this sound like a virus?
Click to expand...

No it doesn't. Viruses are much more subtle than that these days.

a) try emptying your wastebin

b) if you are running norton, then maybe you are running their protected
wastebin as well? If so, empty that.

c) Do you have either indexing, or system restore turned on? both of
those can chew up fair amounts of space under the 'system volume
information' folder (which you don't own, and can't look at, unless you
give yourself rights to it)

d) In WinXP (you didn't say which OS) 'Search' is crippled; unless you
turned on 'subfolders' and 'hidden and system folders' it won't find
half the things that are actually on the disk. Try a decent search
engine (Google will find you several .. 'Agent Ransack' used to be
pretty good.
 
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