Disappearing HD space

XaLEv · Post by **XaLEv** » 2003-07-19 05:03am

Lately I've noticed my free space going up and down for no obvious reason. The first time, a few weeks ago, it went down by six hundred meg. Then about a week later it went back up again. Just in the past couple of days it's gone down again by about four hundred meg. I reset a few minutes ago and checked it, then a few minutes after that it had gone up by about fifty.

Anyone here familiar with this sort of thing?

master_yoda · Post by **master_yoda** » 2003-07-19 07:01am

Yeah, the same happened to me. Except it was in much shorter intervals, and less hd space. After a while, it sort of went away.

Joe · Post by **Joe** » 2003-07-19 11:04am

You haven't been deleting stuff, have you? My HD sometimes does that shit when I remove a lot of files.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2003-07-19 11:25am

Sounds like your page file growing & shrinking like crazy.

When your free space take a plunge again, check to see what your page file useage.

Under windows NT onward is is easy (taskmanager), but under win9x I cant remember how you check to see how mcuh of the page file is in use.

Try forcing your swap file to a minimum, this should stop it trashing like crazy. (I force my swap file to be a minium of 1gb in size, with 512mb of physical ram...)

Frankly I dont think I would notice if I lost upt to a gb of hhd space.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-07-19 12:52pm

Your swapfile probably is expanding and contracting at ludicrious rates. Get more RAM.

XaLEv · Post by **XaLEv** » 2003-07-19 03:14pm

I've been watching the swap file. It generally stays between 80 and 150 meg. Not large enough by far. I have 640 meg of RAM already.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-07-19 03:33pm

Start monitoring what applications are active and what they're doing.

Lord of the Farce · Post by **Lord of the Farce** » 2003-07-20 01:20am

If you have Office XP, then you might want to uninstall "fast searching support", and look for a directory called "C:\WINDOWS\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\Office Search Services\IndexingService" and check the properties for massive size.

Keevan_Colton · Post by **Keevan_Colton** » 2003-07-20 04:41am

XaLEv wrote:I've been watching the swap file. It generally stays between 80 and 150 meg. Not large enough by far. I have 640 meg of RAM already.

Hm....with 640 mb of RAM then paging could range as far as your first post described....

Vertigo1 · Post by **Vertigo1** » 2003-07-20 05:29pm

This is why I highly recommend limiting your swap file (page file for NT/2k/XP users) to a given range. That way your hard drive won't get too fragmented and won't take absolutely forever when defragging every month.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-07-20 06:37pm

Bah. Better to have a fragmented drive than to run out of pagefile space.

XaLEv · Post by **XaLEv** » 2003-07-20 06:48pm

Whenever it happens I search for all files modified in the past two or three days but never find anything anomalous.

Vertigo1 · Post by **Vertigo1** » 2003-07-20 07:23pm

phongn wrote:Bah. Better to have a fragmented drive than to run out of pagefile space.

If that happens, you can easily increase the limit. I rarely hit even 768MB on my pagefile let alone the 1GB limit I have set. It all depends on how much bloated crap you use.

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Disappearing HD space

Disappearing HD space

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