hello after much curiosity of where all of my hard drive space is being eaten up, i downloaded a program that shows you. well i singled out a file called GLCD9.tmp. this file usees 123 gb of my hard disk. i havent been able to find out what its purpose is through google searches. i am reluctant to delete the file. i dont see why it has to use half of my hard drive. it was installed on my system 6 months after i purchased my pc, according to "properties". it seems that if it was necessary it would have come installed with windows (taking up that much space). any ideas? thanks
C:\Documents and Settings\HP_Administrator\Local Settings\Temp\<Files> this is according to WinDirStat When i try manually finding this folder it is not there. But, i have the option of deleting the file directly from WinDirStat.
I did a bit of Googling, you're not the only person to have had this happen, the files usually start GLC and then one or more random numbers. The general consensus seems to be that they are rogue files left over from some software installation, or insanely bloated temp or log files created by some badly coded application. No single piece of software seems to be implicated, which makes me wonder if it's something common to a number of applications like a generic installer or updater. One person claimed they were associated with Google. I do know that Google Earth can create crazily huge files. It might be interesting to compare the "file creation" date with the "last modified" date. I think the upshot is, yes, you can safely delete it. No well coded software should be filling up disk space to that extent. I have a routine that runs at shutdown which completely empties my temp folder, to avoid exactly this sort of issue. Anything in the temp folder is fair game for deletion when the current session is shut down. If it's been there for months, ditch it, and watch to see if a similar file comes back.
wow! so i deleted the first file in this temp folder and my HDD sounded like it had made some sigh of relief. And then just like that my hard drive's free space went from 30 gb to 151 gb. not to mention, that folder that was housing it dropped to a couple of gb's. i wish i would have noted the name of the file, for it was around 120 gb's. there is still a lot of junk in that folder. it would be nice if i could access it through explorer and just wipe the files out, but i can only get to it through that program i mentioned above, and its a one by one deletion process that way. thanks again Indo
What happens if you try to inspect that folder's contents with Windows Explorer? You may need to open the "Folder options" in Windows Explorer, it's under "Tools" on the menu bar, and select "View", and make sure "show hidden files and folders" is selected. Once you get access, you can monitor the folder for any more things like this. You will probably find some files with today's date and names like ~DF7FB6.tmp, these are used by, and will be locked by, Windows, but any files or folders older than today's date are OK to delete. if you select "details" view you will be able to click at the top of the date column and sort them by date, that will make it easier to see their age.
yes that worked, thanks to you. its probably a good idea to clean up that folder every now and again. did you say you have a program that you use to do that daily? thanks
it's a batch file I cooked up. I changed it to suit your temp folder path. Works on XP and 2000. Copy to Notepad & save to desktop or some other handy place as a command file (.cmd extension). It cleans all folders and files, that it can, from the current user's temp folder before shutting down the system. I call it shutoff.cmd and I saved it to my desktop and I use it instead of the Turn Off Computer option on the Start Menu. If you used del %temp%\*.* it would delete stuff merrily in alphabetical order and then balk at the first file that was locked, leaving all the subsequent deletable files alone, whereas Deltree does what it can and leaves the rest, and it removes folders too. If you are using 2K or XP you have to get a copy of Deltree.exe from a Windows 98 disk or you can download it from http://terrikaduck.netfirms.com/deltree.zip Unzip deltree.exe and place it in the C:\Windows\System32 folder.
