Hey, My uncle is having issues with his disk space on his desktop computer. He is running Win XP Pro, and there is actually around 500MB free space. However most times when he boots up his PC, it comes up saying "low disk space of approx 59MB" and he is asked to remove programs etc. Then he goes through this step and cleans up by removing temporary internet files etc, but not actually removing any programs. After this, it says he now has 500MB again??!! Originally when he had the problem, I went into system restore and reduced this usage to the minimum and this fixed the issue to get him to 500MB free space. Please help....Why does it keep doing this and how can we stop it as he does actually seem to have enough space. I have added up all folders on the drive etc and he has enough space. Thanks
If he uses Internet Explorer, try going to [bold]tools>options>general>temporary internet files>settings>amount of disk space to use[/bold] and change it to the minimum. That's the amount of space Internet Explorer uses to save webpage information, which makes pageloading faster. But it can also use valuable space.
Hey, Firstly...Thanks so much already for your help and time. I really appreciate it. From memory, his hard drive is 4 or 5g. I realise that he should have a new hard drive.....But I really can't get the time to reload windows for him again. I hear that reducing page file helps?? If I am to do this....Does anyone recommend a minimum amount/percentage that I should not go below for this?? I also hear that turning off hibernation can help, how much space will turning off hibernation free up roughly....And how do I do this?? Thanks again.
hibernation only uses up the same amount of space as your system memory... so if you have 256MB of memory to hibernate youll need 256MB of space. why dont you just invest in a new 40 gig IDE hard drive... you can get them dirt cheap these days. you can get an 80 gig for £40 and if youve been managing fine with only 4 - 5 gig youll never run out of space with a 40 or 80 gig drive you could use something like norton ghost to clone the old drive onto the new one so theres plenty of space to install new programs without having to mess around.
if your uncle goes into windows explorer, right clicks his pc it should show how muck space is left on the pc, if there is a lot, and when he boots it still says that it is low, virus. if on the other hand there is no space left, i would have to say it might be system restore. i have seen system restore take up 20 - 30 gigs.
@ theVIKING soz said that his uncles hard drive is only a 5 gig... so i doubt system restore is using up 30 gig of it @ soz fact of the matter is that a 5 gig hard drive is simply not enough to run windows XP and still have space to store a lot of files and install a lot of programs, your uncle needs a new hard drive
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=285107 You can turn off the warning by creating a registry key following the procedures in that link. I would suspect it is his swap file causing the extra usage. It's size can change dynamically. When you boot up it is proably trying to allocate the maximum amount for it. You would have to turn on show hidden files and look for pagefile.sys on the root of C: to see it. You can set the size in Control Panel/System then Advanced Tab, cliok on Setting in Performance, then the Advanced tab in Performance settings, then Virtual Memory. I would probably leave it at the system managed size though. Usually Windows reserves 1.5x your physical memory, so if you have 1 gig, it reserves 1.6, 256m it reserves 384, etc on the system managed size setting
