Weirrd Hard Drive Memory Problem
Jay_NOLA
Traveler
I cleared off about a gig of files from my system after I installed the Cosmo 3 CC3+ Beta and now I'm having lots of hard drive space vanish 4 gig, down to 2, now on reboot down to 1 after doing disk clean up and rebooting. Any ideas if it is a memory leak or something causing this.
Comments
Mostly, these will just help you determine where the space is being used currently. They may not be able to help determine why the space is distributed that way.
I also noticed that windows media player asked me to set up the player settings again.
Windows is also saying I only have 600 MB of space left on my drive now. I think Windows or another program is making back up or something isn't being deleted hat is supposed to in a hidden temp folder. My Windows restore is is set to 0 and is turned off from what I can tell.
Dogtag, I downloaded WindDirStat and will try it out. Right now I'm not sure what to do I'm afraid to install anything.
The portable download is a "setup" file that really just unzips the portable files to a single directory you choose. I have dozens of portable apps (some are insanely useful) on a flash drive that I use at various client sites where I need familiar tools but don't have installation permissions. At home, I created a Portable Apps folder in the root to store my portable apps since Windows can be finicky about manually saving stuff to the Program Files folder.
I've had no choice but to switch updates off for everything except the antivirus, or pretty soon I won't have a laptop I can use.
I can be deep in thought about this or that, and she suddenly chips in with some spurious offer of assistance - usually irrelevant.
It seems MS decided it wants to be Apple, after all, and remove the customizations and freedoms that so many Windows users preferred over Mac's "our way or the highway" approach. The mis-named "Fluent" (aka "Ribbon") interface alone has reserved a special place in Hell for them, as far as I'm concerned. Throw in the horribly-designed flat interface, the needlessly-crippled theme/cusomization options, a bewilderingly-limited color palette that hearkens back to VGA, icons redesigned by drunken kindergarten wombats after a 3-day bender, Siri's younger, more bratty sister that no one was clamoring for, forced updates, assuming that everyone who ever uses Windows will do so with a touch screen (messages that say "tap here," for crying out loud), assuming that everyone will suddenly start using Windows mobile devices, and fall over themselves to send all their usage data, browsing habits, contact info, and other personal information to MS servers, and moving to a SaaS licensing model has more or less assured I will never purchase another version of pretty much any of their software.
But about Cortana...
You can disable Cortana with a registry hack (a manual entry/change to the registry). HowToGeek has some nice instructions geared toward non-geeks. You can find them here. Be sure to read the whole thing and, if you're unfamiliar with the registry, be sure to follow their link to the registry "primer" to learn. Alternatively, the article also includes a link to a clickable registry hack so you don't have to mess with the registry yourself. You can download a zip file that actually includes two hacks, one for disabling Cortana and one for re-enabling it. You should still read the article and follow the precautions it describes before using the clickable hacks.
I don't have first-hand knowledge of the hack's efficacy because, literally, after 2 minutes of Windows 10 I was pretty sure I didn't want it and, after 30, I was certain I would only ever touch it again when forced to by my clients. And that was pre-Anniversary Update.
I hope the link helps. Sorry for the OT rant.
Cheers,
~Dogtag
There is an article bout that here
At this rate MS are going to destroy themselves, because people like me won't be able to sustain an internet presence for very much longer, and will eventually give up the fight to stay online... and I'm pretty sure that even though everyone in America seems to have unlimited broadband, the majority of the rest of the world is metered just like my broadband.
Not so long ago 10 gig a month was a sizeable allowance. But not any more.
As for the US and unlimited broadband? I seem to hear people from over there complaining over limits all the time, from all the complaints I am hearing, it seems to be one of the worst "western" countries when it comes to broadband (and other telecommunication services, actually). In my opinion, 10 GB a month was poor even 10 years ago though. Fortunately, Norway has never had limits on non-mobile broadband (The biggest ISP tried doing that when they first introduced DSL, but they soon realized that was a huge mistake)). Broadband speeds has been more a concern here though, due to slow expansion of new infrastructure
I think someone needs to talk to our mobile broadband providers, because until about 6 months ago you could only ever get a maximum of 5 GB per month - even from Vodafone, which is an American company. I switched from Vodafone because they were starting to get rather expensive, and now use Three Mobile. There are some mainline phone broadband providers who sell unlimited broadband, but you have to pay so much in the first place just to have a mainline phone (line rental £40 per month), that you might as well just stick with mobile broadband, which is just as fast and less than half the price.
The real problem is when megalomaniac monopolising companies like MS decide they know what's best for everyone, and start to skew the established balance.
10 Gig was all I ever needed, even including audio books (which I happen to be rather fond of listening to) until just recently.
@everyone,
I did the following which may resolve the glitch I hope. The indexing of Windows may be the problem from what I could find. The Indexing file can become corrupt and also had a bug that was fixed awhile in some Windows versions 7 and up from what I could find but didn't restore the lost hard drive space and fixes every thing until you re index. An index that would take 1 gig ends up taking over 100 and continues to grow. I'm having to re-index Windows at the moment. Started this last night. The missing drive space returned along with some more but no idea how much will be left when Windows finishes its indexing as an index ought to take a gig or 2. The recomendation I found were to run check disk, do a disk clean up, and reindex and see if that fixes things.
Right now I've got about 4 gigs of hard drive space and I ought to have another gig or 2 when I reboot. Also found out that Windows is eating up a ton of hard drive space when I hibernate my lap top and was told to turn that feature off reboot and turn it on again as it may not be clearing out everything.
I also ran Sbyboot and had it purge any temp files it could yesterday.
@Monsen I removed any backup and also had to run a command line to delete any shadow copies as the remove backups and remove shadow copies options don't always remove all of them. That didn't fix everything.
Lightning fast search, as you type. Even supports regex, if you're into that. Since I started using it many years ago, I've never have any problem finding a file on my multi-hard-drive system. Ever. The only time I run into a snag is if looking for something on my FAT32-formatted flash drives or on my NAS, but my NAS has it's own indexing/search options.
And did I mention there's a portable version? It's so cool. I bring it with to my client sites and I'm often able to find stuff before my clients can.
No, I don't get kickbacks from Voidtools. Mainly because I'm just an enthusiastic end-user but also because it's completely, 100%, free.
It's really just what's useful to the user. I found that Windows Indexing was taking up way too many resources, including CPU, RAM, and disk space, so I just don't bother. But for some people that isn't an issue and the Windows feature makes good sense.
I noticed those options on Everything, but in my mind, it is great as a portable tool for local searches, but if I really wish to install and set up server services and so on, then I can just stick with windows search. I noticed from the options of Everything that it had options to set up schedule for it's own indexes, so it is bound to use some resources when doing so too. And of course, I really like full-text searches. Not for my own files, I usually have very good control over where I keep things, but for a lot of other materials I get from other sources.
But, that are just reasons for me that it is not the best for my situation. Very few people beat my network complexity at their home (many of those that do are REALLY extreme though), so my own situation is rarely applicable to others. And I do love good portable apps. I found that I already had Everything installed on my portable tool stick, just hadn't tried it before
To a certain degree, but if you search over the network, or do full text searches, and index realyl speeds things up.
I did install WinDirStat that Dogtag suggested found a couple of things with it.
I had a bunch of old files I had deleted in $Recycle.Bin folders almost 2 gigs. I'm not sure what $Recycle.Bin is I have 3 sub directories under it and lots of folders filled with small files of old images, etc. I had backed up onto disk or deleted in the past. Not sure if it safe to delete any of that stuff. It looks like old recycle bin stuff that never got fully deleted and a bunch of fragments of old deleted files.
Had almost a gig of old crash reports for Firefox that were not deleted.
Windows is still losing hard drive space on a reboot though.
Those weird names of the subdirectories are actually the sid's (security identifiers) of the users they belong to. Some of those accounts are probably various service accounts, but everything in here is deleted files, so those accounts doesn't need those files.
My suggestion would be to delete everything in the Trash Can. If things keep showing up there, something is deleting files and they go into the Trash Can.
I had 5 .5 gigs of free space on Sunday after getting rid of the 2 gigs of stuck files in trash I mentioned and old Firefox crash reports. On a reboot Sunday night I had 4.5 gigs. Yesterday morning I had 3.9 gig and today I have 3.2 gigs. No idea what is eating up the space.
I mean, what else (apart from a failing HD) would cause such gigantic losses of memory associated with shut down and start up? Its like something has got itself stuck in a loop that's triggered by startup/shutdown.
Do you still lose memory overnight if you leave it in standby mode?