[millsware]

My mom has a Lenovo 3000 laptop with Windows XP. She keeps getting a notice that her hard drive is full, so I had to come to the rescue. Unfortunately I failed. She has a 32 GB hard drive, with only 600 MB open right now. I ran Folder Size, and it says that all o the folders on the C drive add up to 17.3 GB. Even if you double the pictures she has saved in a seperate documents folder (which I don't think happens) She should have about 10 GB available.

I tried the trick of turning off System Restore but that didn't help.

Okay to recap:

Hard drive full, can't find the files.
Lenovo 3000 notebook.
Windows XP.

Please and thank you.

[Blackmirror]

Try running this

ATF Cleaner by Atribune.

Double-click ATF-Cleaner.exe to run the program.
Under Main choose: Select All
Click the Empty Selected button.

please make a note of any saved passwords you need

[flavallee]

Right-click RECYCLE BIN, click Properties, move the slider from 10% to 3%, then click Apply - OK.

Right-click MY COMPUTER, click Properties - System Restore, move the slider from 12% to 3%, then click Apply - OK.

Delete everything inside of C:\WINDOWS\TEMP

Delete everything inside of C:\DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGS\(USERNAME)\LOCAL SETTINGS\TEMP

(Note: Everything in those 2 TEMP folders is useless junk, and it's a good place for a "nasty" to hide. They should be emptied out on a regular basis.)

Empty the Recycle Bin, then restart.

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Browse through the Add Or Remove Programs list and uninstall whatever useless and unneeded programs she has in that computer.

They can build up over time and eat up a lot of hard drive space.

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[raybro]

Hi millsware, and welcome to TSG... All good advice from the previous posters. Taking those steps should free up significant space.

For future considerations, because the hard drive will continue to fill again and again, I would also encourage you to consider replacing the hard drive with one of higher capacity. 32GB of disk space is quite small for current operating systems in addition to program applications and files, photos, etc. The XP OS by itself will take up about 9GB.

As an alternative you may wish to consider a USB external hard drive. You can move your My Documents folder to the external and free up considerable space. Also, moving My Documents to another drive will minimize any further bloating to the internal drive.

Raybro

[millsware]

Thanks for the responses so far. I tried those fixes, but could only free up a few hundred MB. So, I have a question, will the operating system size show up on a search with Folder Size? If not, that is where all the space is. If so, the problem is that I can only find about 18 GB of the space that is being used, but My Computer says that it is full.

Also, she should get an external hard drive, you're right. I should have watched her a little more closely when she was shopping for computers a few years ago.

[raybro]

It may be helpful if you could post a few screenshots of some windows. I suggest the following:

Right click C:\ and select Properties. Take a screenshot of it.

Open Disk Management. Drag the right side of the window to open the window a bit. Take a screenshot of it.

Also... Have you ran a defrag of the drive lately?

How about unnecessary programs removal. Are there any you feel are not needed?

Perhaps post a screenshot of the Add/Remove Programs window.

Do you know whether Lenovo has hidden recovery or support tools partitions (like Dell and HP)? If you have an owners manual, it should say.

EDIT... If you do not have an owners manual, you can download one here
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/si...&validate=true
I looked at it and found the laptop 3000 family has variations defined by 4 additional alph-numeric digits.

Raybro