Computer help please

[FJohnSharp]

I have a hard drive that is extremely full and I cannot figure out what's taking up so much space. It's a 40 gb hard drive with 500 mb free. We took off most of the music and pictures and there's very little on there. All I'm asking right here is, how do I see where all the space is being used? IOW without right clicking on every folder and file, is there some sort of utility that give a list or a summary or something?

And thanks in advance.

[Denny]

from Teaching an adult basic computer skills?

SequoiaView

Here is something you might find useful. It's a program developed by a University in Netherlands, which tells you in a pretty little diagram, where all the space went on your computer. I used it just this morning to locate some music files.

[MTGuru]

And here's another very useful tool:

TreeSize (freeware): http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml

This lets you see the occupied space under each top level directory tree, then dig down from there. In some cases, this may be easier than Sequoia's graphical approach.

Things like Windows swap files and e-mail databases can take up a surprising amount of space.

[hans]

I just started using ExplorerXP, see http://www.explorerxp.com/
which is a XP file manager, and free.
Hidden directories are shown, plus the sizes of directories,
and does a lot of nice things,
like showing folders in tabbed view (the reson i started using it),
or side by side, or tiled vertically, for easy drag dropping.
Also possible are wildcard file selection and file rename,
favourite folder groups,
and more stuff.

The 'System Volume Information' folder can be really big with restore point files being kept.
ExplorerXP lets you delete these easily, which Windows Explorer often refuses to do.

PS: do empty the recycle bin if you haven't yet, to free up space.

~Hans

[djm]

If you are sure you have deleted (and not just "marked for deletion" the files you want to get rid of) it's probably a good time to defrag your disk.

djm

[FJohnSharp]

from Teaching an adult basic computer skills?

SequoiaView

Here is something you might find useful. It's a program developed by a University in Netherlands, which tells you in a pretty little diagram, where all the space went on your computer. I used it just this morning to locate some music files.

This is the coolest thing!

[FJohnSharp]

Thanks all. I'll try the other stuff tomorrow.

This is a great place!!

[FJohnSharp]

Oh god i just changed sequoia to color. Wow!

I'm a cheap date.

[MTGuru]

Oooh! Pretty boxes!!

[Charlene]

OK, so once you run Sequoia and see the pretty quilt blocks all in color, how do you delete things? Do you have to go through Windows Explorer? Is it safe to delete all the files relating to Norton Anti Virus if I'm no longer using that program? (I started to but got nervous about the warning message that appeared.)

[MTGuru]

how do you delete things? Do you have to go through Windows Explorer?

Yes! The Sequoia site says explicitly that there's no deletion, in order to prevent accidents. You can choose Explore from the right click menus, and delete from there.

Is it safe to delete all the files relating to Norton Anti Virus if I'm no longer using that program? (I started to but got nervous about the warning message that appeared.)

To delete something like NAV you really need run the unistaller first. Also check the Symantec site for a more thorough uninstall/cleanup app. If you just start deleting files manually, you're asking for trouble.

I found that Norton stuff hooks all sorts of crap into your system, and is notoriously difficult to uninstall. One of the reasons I stopped using it.

Good luck!

[Flyingcursor]

These look pretty cool. I'll try the quilty one.

I'm using Vista 32 bit and I'm not sure the explorerXP will work right.
It took me a long time to find out a lot of my "missing" space is being taken up with search indexes.

[s1m0n]

In default mode XP and likely vista both hide system files from you, the user and owner of said computer. This can make figuring out what's using up the space hard to accomplish.

[Flyingcursor]

Yes. By default they hide all of that. I always turn it on. With Vista I discovered you can go folder by folder and add up all the space and still not find what's using it up. I'm not sure what file the indexing is stored in but that was the culprit.

[hans]

I've done a new system installation, with XP service pack 1, then installed various updates, then service pack 2, and later SP 3. Then I found the restore points used about 4 Gb space, under System Volume Information on the system drive!

~Hans