XP ate the C drive??

My AAO with 8GB solid state HD seems to suffer from C drive bloat immediately upon XP reload. Time and again. I give up 5GB to XP, then install only firefox and skype and in 3 days am down to less than 1GB free. Scan shows no viruses, trash bin is empty and i've only surfed to read the sports page. I've been down low as 335MB free. Paging is off as is Restore. Reloading weekly from USB DVD stinks. Ideas???

 

Take your machine back and replace it with a proper HDD model? lols

Sorry I can't think of anything really. Are you using a restore DVD? or are you using a normal XP disk? I just restored a customers Eee with a normal XP disk, and it had loads of room left in its 8Gb SSD. atm their machine has XP Home, Office 2007, FlashFire, the appropriate drivers and their internet security suite which has a rather large footprint. Still plenty of room left for browsing etc.

P.S. I just remembered I left the paging file on... better ring 'em

 

I think that along with all the other windows oporateing systems that xp automatically backs up your hard drive. is the acsess light constantly flashing?

 

Thanks for your idea.
1) no it does not seem to be flashing. where would it be backing up to (maybe I can track the size of that file/folder/volume)
2) I have no hard drive, but a SSD card
3) since I reloaded XP from scratch thursday, I have not used the machine at all yet the free space on the SSD has shrunk from 2.65GB to 1.66GB. This has been typical trending.

 

Try turning off the Paging File (swap file/virtual memory)
Turn off / disable the Volume Shadow Copy and Windows Backup services
Turn off System Restore
Run a thorough disk cleanup or aftermarket disk cleanup utility (you want to get rid of all restore points and all temporary junk files)
Run the Add/Remove Programs control panel, on the left is a button to install/uninstall windows components, it might be worth it to take out anything that you don't really need.

 

This is vexing. System Restore and Paging are both off 'out of the box'. Therefore, there are no Restore Points?

I don't know where Shadow Copy or Windows Backup Services are, but there is no evidence of either.

The system is on but idle, wirelessly connected, and nibling away at free space. . . .

Should XP require 5 GB?

 

To turn off Shadow Copy and Windows Backup, right click on "My Computer" goto "Manage" and when the management console appears, choose "Services" from the panel on the left. From here you can turn off or disable running services. Be very careful though, turning off the wrong service can render your machine useless.

I'll boot XP into a virtual machine later and report back as to how much a fresh install is supposed to take.

 

That is very helpful. Never seen those menus!

Volume Shadow Copy status is blank (not started)
Windows backup is not listed (another name/notation?)

Interested in the XP size. BTW I have loaded XP SP3. Thx.

 

Which version of XP? Home or Pro?
Was SP3 installed durring setup (integrated into the disk) or post-install like any other update?

 

It is XP Home, SP3 right of the DVD.

Thx

 

Okay cool, i'll have to integrate Sp3 into my disk, but i should have the results for you by this afternoon.

 

Okay, here's the first figures. To start off with I created a VM (Virtual Machine) on my desktop, allowed only 512Mb RAM and only 8Gb hard drive, equivalent to an 8Gb SSD. With one partition. Not quite 8Gb because I used the Windows Setup to format the empty partition using NTFS (Quick). So of course, as per the setup, it partitioned and formatted all bar 7 or 8Mb. Leaving XP free to install on a 7.99Gb partition.

Now I had previously integrated Service Pack 3 (nothing more, nothing less) into my OEM Windows XP Home Edition disk. There were no prior SP's integrated. So now I have a perfect, working Windows XP Home Edition SP3 install disk. As you can see by the screen shot, XP has just finished installing, unactivated (because I didnt use a key and don't intend to keep this rig running), and is asking me to do the initial tour.



The result:
Windows XP Home Edition SP3, freshly installed, with no excess bloatware, no updates, no other software, no nothing, uses only 1.82Gb, leaving 6.16Gb free to be used.

The only SSD I've played with was in an Asus Eee netbook. So I can't say for sure what partitions you're using, but the Eee came with a 241Mb partition. Which would still leave 5.9Gb or so to be used. I'll update this post again soon, after using the Eee's recovery disk to see what is available on them as standard.

EDIT:
Just for laughs I've just run the Auto-Setup from the Eee DVD under Windows, which installs all the bloatware etc. Not all of it's running and only two apps failed to install (Asus Update and the Virus Scanner) but the files are all on the drive now. Still have 5.93Gb spare.

EDIT2:
Okay, have just completed the factory restore as far as I can go in a VM. The recovery process went through fine until the final boot, where Windows throws up the 0x7B BSOD. This is because in a VM I can't emulate the Eee's drive controller and it's the one the recovery image wants to use. So I can't take the recovery itself any further. However I did boot up my Win7 x64 VM and mounted the freshly recovered disk as a secondary drive. So here are the figures. The Factory restore set up a 7.97Gb partition and a 24Mb partition (yes I know I said 241Mb before, but I was only operating from memory, that and I can't see 24Mb being useful, but come to think of it it must be used for caching, considering when I took out that 24Mb partition, the Eee's BIOS no longer could do a "fast boot") But, with the factory restore completed, to a bootable OS, the used space came up to 3.95Gb used, 4.01Gb spare.

 

Very interesting numbers, and closer to what I'd expect. I suspect some duplication in the install, perhaps because it doesn't realize their isn't a std HDD.

Can you suggest a way I could search for hidden or redundant files/partitions that maybe don't show up in windows explorer? (I'm not that experienced with OS's and such sleuthing). To recap, I have paging and restore off. Thx for your efforts!

 

My figures from above include the paging file being on, as well as system restore. What you're looking at is probably, primarily caused by all the bloatware. If you want to try reloading the factory restore, then immediately going to add/remove programs and basically clearing the list out comletely (by uninstalling everything) you should get the majority of your space back. Whatever space isn't reclaimed will be used by paging files, hibernation files (disable hibernation if it's on), system restore files and volume shadow copies (if enabled)

There's a suite of programs I have been using for years to keep my systems clean of temp files, duplicates and redundant system restore files among other things. They will run free for 15 days which should be more than enough for you to clean the system of the junk for a test. Auslogics BoostSpeed is the suite I use. It contains a drive cleaner, registry cleaner, drive defrag, registry defrag, a beutifly crafted add/remove programs app as well as a services manager and there's more. Even though they're paid-for programs, they're the only ones I personally recommend because in my experience they'r the only ones that actually work. If you look in the "Beginners" section of the forum, under the "Windows" subforum, there's a thread i created called the "Windows Software Repository". A few other users and myself have been creating a list of apps and links to those apps. The Auslogics BoostSpeed suite is linked to there.

The basic cleanup done by the Drive Cleaner program in that suite probably won't do much to begin with, but if you go into the options for the app, there's a whole bunch more stuff that can be selected for cleaning. On more than one occasion I've reclaimed gigabytes of free space.

If you're in Australia, have a look at the thread in General Discussion about the Wiki, I'm offering free repairs in exchange for the ability to do a complete teardown on certain models to complete the information on the Wiki itself. I could take a look at where your space has gone if you'd like.

 

Is it possible to delete drivers not necessary after a XP instalation?
I mean, after install Windows keeps lots of drivers not used on c:\windows\drivers and under system and system32 and so on...

 

It's probably best to leave that folder alone. You don't want to accidentally delete something important. Best bet is to just use nLite to remove the drivers you're sure you don't need, at the same time integrate the proper drivers for the netbook. It's actually quite easy.

 

Yes, I know nLite, but...
You mean that there is no way to reduce XP size after instalation?

 

I am having the exact same problem - down to <100MB of space on the C

Swarvey I'm new to this level of PC fault finding so I'm not sure what you mean by "creating a VM" and partitioning - how do you do this?

 

The only real answer to this is "no". Most Windows OS's work on the principal of caching everything from the installer files (albeit temporarily) to the driver.cab file which holds a great deal of driver files and information. So as far as I know, there's no real way to trim down XP after it's installed.

A VM is a "Virtual Machine". Meaning it's not a real computer. It is in fact an emulated computer system running within another fully operational system. In the most basic terms, my main desktop PC had a fake computer running inside it. VM's can be set up in any number of ways, but when I set mine up it was for bench-testing purposes, so I could temporarily install another operating system without making any major modifications to my computer. After I'm done with a VM, I can delete it off my computer as if it never existed.

If you already have an operating system installed on your computer, you're going to have to start looking at disk and cache cleaning options, as well as uninstalling all the clutter from the add/remove programs list. Or, you can reformat and reinstall.

If you want to have a further look at VM's check out VMWare or Microsoft Virtual PC

 

Ah, I see.. the partioning and VM were just you simulating the problem.

Ok, so based on your earlier posts it's possible to get XP Home SP3 down to less than 2GB but only by reinstalling and being selective on what is installed?