19 December 2006

Space, the computer's frontier

Holy shucking fit! I was trying to download some free things from the iTunes store, and it says my hard drive is full. My 70-Gig HD on my desktop. I don't download porn unlike some people I know. I don't download movies like others. I only have a 20-Gig iPod and I think I only own around 30 Gigs of music. Windows and Office and Warcraft III don't take up 40 Gigs. I'm going to run a defrag overnight, but that won't figure out the problem for me.

Help me out here folks. I've already gone and cleared out temp files. I went into my iTunes folder and there were a bunch of .tmp files there too that seem to have cleared up a couple freakin' GIGS of space. I am suspicious that it's a fucked up iTunes library, but I'm not sure how to fix it. I've seen visualization programs for the Mac that allow you to see how much disk space is allocated to different programs, is there one for the PC (Win XP)?

*grumble grumble* I didn't notice anything that looked like spyware when I ran the Task Manager, so I think I'm safe there. What else can I do to figure out (a) where my space's gone, and (b) how to stop gap in until I can figure it out?

Thanks in advance for any help.

ETA: Ugh, Disk Defragmenter says I can't run the defrag effectively b/c I now have only 6% of the disk free (5 Gigs) and it wants at least 15%. *grumble*

2 comments:

TS said...

Did you import your iTunes library from another computer? If you first copied the files to the hard drive and then imported them into iTunes, it could very well be that they still reside in the original place as well as being copied into the "My Documents/iTunes" folder.

If that is not the case and you don't have a USB drive, I think it is time to invest in one and back up your drive ASAP before you attempt something else like a defrag.

I don't think you will be able to spot spyware in Task Manager. Use Windows Defender, you might have to download it if it's not already on your machine.
I assume that you have a firewall installed (other than the crappy Microsoft one) and an anti virus program as well.

Allison M. said...

If you haven't figured this problem out yet... I would recommend WinDirStat (http://windirstat.info/) - I used it to find somebody's well-hidden porn/warez stash on our fluorometer PC at work... LOL