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Space is constantly running out

B

blackrain2

Member
Hi. I have windows 7 ultimate. It seems that no matter what I do, space is constantly running out. I keep moving gigabytes and gigabytes of data. And the next time I boot up the PC, it tells me that I have 10mb of space left. How is that possible? Is the paging file broken? How is it possible that I have freed up over 5GB of space (possibly even 10GB of space or more) and I am still down to 10 mb of space and constant warning messages about being out of space. Its as if something is broken. What file can be growing like this (other than the paging file)?

Please help.
 
The page file is generally set to a specific size range, so it shouldn't keep growing in size.

Maybe your drive that your OS is on has bad sectors, and as they go bad, your available free space keeps shrinking. You can run a program like CrystalDiskInfo to see your drive's health.

Also, how old is your Windows 7 install? Maybe you have some system errors or even malware. If the utility shows your drive health as being good, maybe it's time for a clean install.
 
Treesize has this useful block view but its the default view of Spacesniffer. You can identify in seconds where most of the space is being occupied. Run either of these tools as administrator so that you can peer into system folders. Two unusual culprits I have found are not user data which may explain what is going on. One is the WinSxS folder which gets bloated out in older 7 installations. I have found a tool called Wise Disk Cleaner that can reduce the size of this folder in 7. The other location is system volume information. By default it will show as 0 bytes occupied but I found a machine that had 150GB in there. You have to adjust NTFS permissions on the folder just to get in there and then take ownership of the random files in it to delete them. The command vssadmin delete shadows can clear this out but then you may lose system restore points so take care with it.
 
I once had some kind of errant process that would spawn all these files in the Windows TEMP folder, which I happened to discover accidentally. All were equal size but there were thousands of them totaling many tens of GBs (IIRC over 30GB). The file extension was not common or known, so I just opened several of them with text editor like Notepad. There were references in there to Hewlett Packard printer software and HP Customer Improvement Program. So I uninstalled every HP app I could find and they stopped. Deleted all the files, reinstalled the latest HP printer software and never returned.
 
The more surfing you do, the more temp files are created and retained by Win 7. They can grow like mad. BTW, how full is your drive?
 
PliotronX said:
WinSxS folder
Click to expand...

this is my usual culprit. windows updates love them some space eating. really annoying to get a low space warning, clear off 20 gigs, just to have windows fill it with update cache.

as pointed out, that folder doesn't get counted when you go through the usual properties dialogue to get the size of a folder. i thought i was nuts because i had ~50 GB unaccounted for.
 
Speaking of which, "Disk Cleanup" (accessable from right-clicking C-colon and selecting Properties), and then from there, clicking "System Files". Which then presents an option "Update Files Cleanup" or something like that.

What that feature does, is goes through all of your WinSxS files, and removes the unnecessary ones. Unfortunately, even with an SSD, this can take QUITE A WHILE. Like, "hours". Even on an SSD. Forget it if you're on an HDD.
 
VirtualLarry said:
Speaking of which, "Disk Cleanup" (accessable from right-clicking C-colon and selecting Properties), and then from there, clicking "System Files". Which then presents an option "Update Files Cleanup" or something like that.

What that feature does, is goes through all of your WinSxS files, and removes the unnecessary ones. Unfortunately, even with an SSD, this can take QUITE A WHILE. Like, "hours". Even on an SSD. Forget it if you're on an HDD.
Click to expand...
Under win 8.1 Disk Cleanup -> system files takes only 15 to 30 minutes or so to complete using a platter drive. I always do this after a fresh install when all updates completed. I just cleaned up my win10 install including Updates and it took 30 mins on my SSD - 20GB of crap.

I have no idea why yours takes so long.
 
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