The Mysterious Case of the Hidden Files

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dobro

dobro

Well-known member
I'm looking for more free space on my 3.2 gig hard drive. I ran scandisk, and it came up with this:

8,388,608 bytes in 110 hidden files

What's the story on hidden files, and is this normal, is this virus time, or is this time to reinstall windows?

Second question: is it possible for Windows to get fooled about how much free disk space there is? I haven't been paying much attention to disk space until recently, but I seem to remember having almost 2 gigs free space until recently, and now I'm down to about 1 gig, and I'm not using the hard drive for storage of music files.
 
DoBro: don't bother with optimizing that 3.2GB postage stamp. Get thee some real estate. Slak man dropped a hint about 20GB for $156.
As to that hidden stuff:
Hidden is a term that applies to the status as seen by the Windows OS in the Explorer App. It's just a ploy to try to decrease the chance you might mangle or delete some important file. You can't recover the hidden file space as it probably has some important stuff (no guarantees, though) but get a grip:
That's less than 10MB. A meaningless hair on a donkey's butt.
Get with the program. Get a real HD.
My Win98 system gobbles more than 4GB for just bullshit associated with the apps that I run intermittently. That's why I made sure I had >8GB left after that task was fulfilled.
And no matter how many terrabytes you have, Cleaning House is important.
 
Just for your computer fooling around pleasure, you can go to my computer click on view at the top of the screen, go down to folder options click on that then click on view. Here you have a choice to select "do not show hidden files", or "show all files". I use show all files so I can see what the heck is going on.

Layth
 
I have seen when I ran scandisk and found nothing then ran chkdsk from dos and found something. Some of your music programs may be
saving backup data too. I would run a 3rd
party program like wincheck to see if there are any redundant files that you dont need.
Also check your chkdsk files. You may have a lot of them if you have run chkdsk and told chkdsk to save them to files. They are basically useless files.
Yes get a new hard drive. Tigerdirect has a
quantum 19gig with a 3yr warranty for $149.
cheap and well worth it. Also (if im not mistaken) windows uses 32k chunks by default
and this can be changed to 8 or 16. This would result in a more optimized drive.
You cant lose disk space without writing to it or have bad sectors. If you have not run
a thourough scandisk I would do that also.
Tell one of your buddys you need to borrow $150 bucks to bail out someone. Thats no lie is it!!
DuckHead
 
One easy way to keep track of newly created files that are just temps is to do a "Find"
and use the advanced option to filter out any files smaller than such and such # of KBs, and also filter it based on the file timestamp: only files newer than yesterday.
I found a huge pile of temp crap that I didn't notice until it swelled to >1GB.
 
I have seen when I ran scandisk and found nothing then ran chkdsk from dos and found something. Some of your music programs may be
saving backup data too. I would run a 3rd
party program like wincheck to see if there are any redundant files that you dont need.
Also check your chkdsk files. You may have a lot of them if you have run chkdsk and told chkdsk to save them to files. They are basically useless files.
Yes get a new hard drive. Tigerdirect has a
quantum 19gig with a 3yr warranty for $149.
cheap and well worth it. Also (if im not mistaken) windows uses 32k chunks by default
and this can be changed to 8 or 16. This would result in a more optimized drive.
You cant lose disk space without writing to it or have bad sectors. If you have not run
a thourough scandisk I would do that also.
Tell one of your buddys you need to borrow $150 bucks to bail out someone. Thats no lie is it!!
DuckHead
 
Duck is onto something here about the back up files your audio software may be creating. I know that all of mine do, except GoldWave which is really not a recorder as much as an editor. When you save or even process a file, look right next to it and you will see the file name with some weird extention next to it. That backup file is usually just a file that you could run back to if you wanted to undo, but that is no guarantee. Just delete them and you will save a lot of space.

Also, make sure that you are clearing your history file in Internet Explorer. I cannot count how many times I recommend this to someone and it turns out that they had dedicated many MB's of disk space and where holding webpages visted for over 60 days sometimes. IE like to set the history folder to like 60 days by default. In your browser, go to Tools>Internet Options and look for that good ol' history file. Set it to save pages for 0 days. Also, it is a good idea to just delete the stuff that is in there after an internet session. Also, that temp file should be cleared out also after a session. IE will really start to chew up some disk space after awhile. If you find that these settings where set to hold pages for a long time, delete the stuff and run your OS's defrag program. I think will notice quite a performance increase then. Also, in Internet Tools, don't allow very much space for saving temp file for IE. About 10MB will do you fine if you are not surfing around the whole world for hours on end and needing to get back to certain pages often. I have a big drive and set mine for quite a bit more, but I can afford the space. You can't.

Check those things out and see if maybe you start getting some more space available.

Good luck.

Ed

P.S. I am sure that a nice plea to Slackmaster would get you some other advice about getting rid of stuff that will clear out space. Also, he may be able to provide some other default settings that can be changed so that your OS isn't hogging up so much of the disk.
 
I believe you. And I will follow your advice (and Slack's pointer to the 20 gig drive - I didn't miss that).

In the meantime, there's something unusual I've noticed on my postage stamp system that may crop up with larger disks later on. This afternoon, I had about a gig of free space available. This evening, I recorded three takes, saved two to a CD-RW, dumped one, and now Explorer tells me I have about 600 megs of free space left on the hard drive! Near as I can tell, every time I record and save something, I'm losing about 150 megs of space on the hard disk; every time I record and dump something, I lose about 50 megs. Any ideas?

ps I was relieved to hear about the meaningless hair on the donkey's butt, though. :)
 
Dobro, this might sound pretty dumb, but did you empty the recycle bin after deleting that take? If not then there's a good chance it's still there!

To completely bypass the recycle bin, hold down the "Shift" key when you click Delete.

Also, I'd be leary about running chkdsk as I'm not sure if it was updated for FAT32 in which case it might wrongly find a lot of errors. I'm not sure about this though. I find that running scandisk is adequate. Notice the Advanced Options button..there's good stuff in there.

Win98 also comes with a Disk Cleanup program which will delete IE files, temp files, and empty the recycle bin for you in one shot.

The number one way to free up space on a 3GB hard drive? Get a new hard drive :) www.componentsdirect.com or www.pcmall.com both have decent deals on HD's.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Helping hands all round, and lots of ideas to try out! (I'm slow as a mole, Slack, but I do empty the recycle bin all the time :)) I'll let you know what turns up - gracias, companeros. (companero: "companion, partner, playmate")

dobro del pequeno disco duro
 
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