WinXP is eating my HD memory

D

DudeHead

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Sorry for the odd subject heading, but it was the only way to explain my problem. When I turn on my computer let's say I have 8gigs free. By the end of the day I will only have like 1gig free. Something in XP is eating my memory.

However, when I reboot my computer, my memory reappears--in other words I have the 8 gigs free again. Anybody got any ideas how to fix this or even what the problem could be?

By the way: Running XP Home, 1.7Ghz, 40gig HD--and I tried running CHKSDSK or however it is spelled but it hangs at the end (maybe this is the problem?) and does not reboot my computer when finished.

Thanks dudes!
 
Welcome to the forums DudeHead. :) Sounds like a virus of some sort maybe that is eating your hard drive space. Do you have kaaza? Try doing a virus check, online if necessary.
 
Originally posted by Hipster Doofus
Welcome to the forums DudeHead. :) Sounds like a virus of some sort maybe that is eating your hard drive space. Do you have kaaza? Try doing a virus check, online if necessary.

I used both Symantec's online virus checker and my own and they revealed no viruses. Also, I do use Kazaa (Well Kazaa lite) but the memory loss occurs even when Kazaa lite is not in use. THere are no viruses in the partial kazaa downloaded files either. Can you think of anything else that could be causing this?

P.S. Thanks for the welcoming!
 
Well I know that System Restore takes up alot of services. Is it possible that this has gone wrong or is configured wrong and is taking more resources than normal.

It maybe that they amount of space is being read wrong aswell, try a diskcheck in DOS (or Recovery Console) and see what the amount reads as. These are just a few suggestions.
 
Did you run bootvis? If so search for a file trace.log. It can become very big.
 
Hi, run your computer for a while. Then when you would normally turn it off and u have no space left. Run disk defragmentor and analyse the hard drive in question, see what colour all this data thats filling up ur hdd is. You can also do it as u boot up and take a screen shot for comparison.

Try manually setting your page file to around 1.5x your ram, not windows managed. Then try turning off windows restore on that drive. Make sure your virus scanner is up to date and is scanning the boot sector of your hdd. I think this is either 2 things, a hard drive going bad or a virus duplicating itself because ive never seen or heard of windows xp doing this and if it is windows you can slap my arse and call me jenny :)

If all else fails, back up, format your hard drive then rebuild your system and see if it does the same thing. To see if it was a virus just run your system at first without restoring any programs/files and see if it does it then. Let us know how you get on.
 
check out this freeware app
SequoiaView
http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/

Ever wondered why your hard disk is full? Or what directory is taking up most of the space? When using conventional disk browsing tools, such as Windows Explorer, these questions may be hard to answer. With SequoiaView however, they can be answered almost immediately. SequoiaView uses a visualization technique called cushion treemaps to provide you with a single picture of the entire contents of your hard drive. You can use it to locate those large files that you haven't accessed in one year, or to quickly locate the largest picture files on your drive
 
What about your virtual memory? Is it set too high? If so, one good thing to do is set it to a relatively low amount (512MB minimum AND 512MB maximum).
 
Think I had a worm once that seemed to be taking up quit a bit of space. was located in hidden files I couldnt access. AVG occasionaly spat out a warning but the damn thing was pretty elusive. had to format that drive to get rid of the sucker.
 
Thanks guys for all the help--it appears that my trace.log file is growing. Weird how I never saw this before. Anyway, I can't seem to delete it though:)..should I just reboot to command prompt and delete it? Or what's the .exe that runs with bootvis...pretty sure i deleted it.
 
try booting into safemode and deleting the file..

while booting hit F8 after the POST screen.. choose safe mode and you should be able to delete that file..
 
Can't delete it in safe mode, or safe mode with command prompt. However, I did manage to move the file--but something else managed to recreate the file in the original location. Hmm, weird.

I tried disabling WMI in the services but I was still unable to delete.

Any other suggestions?
 
by the way, the file is in /windows/system32/logfiles/ called trace.log
 
Fixed the problem. Bootvis was logging everything--changed it to not log anything. Thx for the help guys.

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