Useless Space Taken up By Windows XP

Hi Folks:
I hope someone can help me out there. I have Windows Xp installed on my computer. But the trouble is that it occupies almost 11 gigs of space on the 20 gig portion my partitioned hard drive. When I open explorer to check this out; it says that Windows is only occupying around 3.5 gigs of space. Can anybody please tell me what is occupying the missing 7.5 gigs of space and how can I recover this lost space.

I suspect that I may have lost this space over time due to ongoing updates from Windows. Does this make sense to anyone?

When I try to defrag this drive I get a flag that says I only have 11% of free space to work with when I should have around 50%.

I hope I have provided enough information for somebody out there to help.

Thank-you in advance

SHERLOCKHOLMES

 

Are you setup to view hidden and system files in Explorer? What makes you think the extra space is used by Windows? You could try using WinDirStat (Google it) to get a graphical view of your filesystem and hunt for large unwanted files.

 

The reason that I think the unused space is in Windows is because when I open Windows Explorer and right click on the Windows Folder in the left hand pane and select properties it says that Windows is occupying 10.9 gigs of space. However if I go into the right hand pane and highlight all files and folders and then right click and go to properties it says that Windows is occupying 3.77 gigs of space.

I will try WinDirStat and see what I can find.

Thanks for your help. I will post what I find.

 

Try downloading and running Ccleaner from Piriform with all options checked.

 

WinDirStat informs me that there is a huge file within Windows named Installer taking up 7.2 gigs which is exactly the space I am "missing." Is there any way I can eliminate these files without doing any harm to my system?

 

Try checking thier creation date, if they were created at a later time than the other Windows files then your system can run without them, but be sure to check for any other software was installed around the same time that may have dependancies on the folder.

 

Rather than deleting these installer files; can I safely move them to my D drive to freeup space on my C drive? Would this create any conflicts in accessing anything?

Thanks for any info you can provide me.

 

Sure, if it causes a problem, you'll be notified. It sounds like a failed os install? or perhaps MS office leftovers or some other huge program? If you got the space, I'd move it and see what happens. I suspect that it won't be any problem. If it's not, then after a while go ahead and nuke it.
If it was me, I'd be mighty curious about what put it there, though.