What's taking up my hard drive?

[Maniacal]

Last December I checked the hard drive on my mom's computer, 50 gigs taken and 30 free. Today I checked it and it said I only had 5 gigs left.

I did an approximate calculation of the size it showed of the programs in the Add + Remove programs option, 22 gigs. Downloaded stuff couldn't possible exceed 10 gigs (my My Pictures folder is only 51 megs and it has a lot of pictures off the net).

I want to know hwere the rest of that memory is being used. That still leaves at least 50 gigs for Windows, etc. More than enough. Something is wrong, I am going to run the virus scanner after I go to bed.

EDIT: The different My Documents (it's a shared computer) take up 11 gigs. Of which only 3.4 is mine.

 

[cidknee]

im gonna say junk. but mines the same way, ive moved alot of programs from my 20G ( main hdd) over to my 40 and i still dont see any improvememnt in freeing up space on it

 

[DaEezT]

Probably windows system restore stuff. Per default it's set to use up to 12% of every partition for system restore points. But that won't account for more than 7 gig in your case.
The rest is probably temorary and personal stuff. Outlook for example stores e-mails in every person's "appication data" folder, which isn't part of "my documents". Same goes for the Firefox cache.

 

[Speedo]

Many of the counters in add/remove programs aren't accurate about how much space the program is using.

Usually the main culprits for sucking up space are system restore and the recycling bin.

 

[Maniacal]

Found the source, it had a freaking long trail to get to. Everything is fine. /sarcasm

and 20 gigs is a awful lot of room to have filled up.

It's a friking embedded virus somewhere in documents and settings, something around 15 folders deep. Besides hogging the hard drive it's not doing anything, heck, lately COD:UO multi has run FASTER [which makes no sense to me].

 

[AL_DA_GREAT]

It coyuld be viruses that are reproducing.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Maybe your temp folders are clogged? I managed to get back like 3 gigs when i cleaned mine...

 

[Maniacal]

6 jkey files are infected. I have 14 gigs free on my hard drive. The only way we can find that will get rid of them is to delete them, none of the anti virus stuff will remove them and some don't even detect it!

 

[Birdjaguar]

6 jkey files are infected. I have 14 gigs free on my hard drive. The only way we can find that will get rid of them is to delete them, none of the anti virus stuff will remove them and some don't even detect it!

Go to symantec.com and search the knowledge base for the virus that is causing the problem. They will have advice for removing it.

 

[Maniacal]

My mom looked there and didn't find anything that helped, so last week she put the 6 jkey files into the trash, they are still there and nothing has been affected. What ARE jkey files anyways?

 

[Speedo]

Most likely nothing (real). All you have to do is tap a few keys to make up whatever file extension you want.

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