A good thing to try when the Windows defragger is not getting the job done
(timing out or not enough free space to work in) is to download a trial copy
of Diskeeper or Perfect Disk and use that. Both of those are excellent in
handling jobs where free space is minimal.
"solon fox" <solonfox@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:55cfb4fb-baba-4eb2-ae11-933d365006ba@xxxxxx
On Jun 17, 9:50 pm, scottyjamison
<scottyjami...@xxxxxx> wrote:
Quote:
> I am a relatively unexperienced windows vista user using windows home
> premium
> at 32 bit on an acer aspire 6920 notebook. I noticed that occassionaly my
> disk space would drop dramatically without me doing anything. 100s of mbs
> would just disappear for no reason, so probably being stupid i decided to
> run
> the disk fragmenter to try and fix the problem. BUT to my horror i was
> shocked to find that the disk fragmenter began to eat up my hard disk
> space
> big style. I went from 79.7GB to 72.5GB in just over an hour.
>
> What the hell happened and can it be fixed? can i get my disk space back?
> i
> thought the disk fragmenter was supposed to help your computer not rob it.
>
> does anyone else have this problem and can someone please help me? im
> kinda
> desparate, i cant believe it.
>
> P.S if someone is kind enough to give me advice and you keep it simple so
> i
> can understand and follow it.
How big is your hard drive? Maybe defrag didn't have enough space to
work in?
Vista has several recovery features that eat disk space; shadow
copies, system recovery check points, updates and even indexing use up
space. Many people have commented on Vista growing and consuming hard
drive space. All of these features are designed to help you in a
recovery situation and basically protect you from losing data. I think
it is beneficial, even though it is alarming when you don't know what
is going on.
You can use 'Disk Cleanup' on your hard drive properties to help free
up space. If you are satisfied with the latest changes to your system
and comfortable with your system stability, then you can use the 'More
Options' tab in Disk Cleanup to remove all but the most recent system
restore point and shadow copies. This would free up quite a bit of
space.
Nonetheless, I think that a long term answer requires some
consideration of offline backups, a plan for archiving the unused but
important data you wish to keep, and as always, a larger primary hard
drive.
-solon fox