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What's taking up all the space?


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chedvah77

chedvah77

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I'm running Windows XP on a two-year-old Dell Inspiron 1520 with a 105 GB hard drive. I clean it regularly using CCleaner, CleanUp!, Ad-Aware, Spybot, and Avast. On Friday, we got blacklisted by our ISP for spamming -- when I called to find out what was going on, they said something about 5000 msgs in one day. :) I don't email nearly that much! So I ran all my cleaning stuff to the full extent (full scans rather than smart scans, etc.) and it found nothing. Thought we were good. Confused, but clear.

This morning when I came to my computer, Avast couldn't update its database because there wasn't enough disk space! Imagine my surprise when I found that my hard drive, normally just under 50% full, had only 60KB left! I ran a search for files over 1 MB -- too many, with digital music and pictures. Adjusted the search for files over 50MB and came back with a smaller group; deleted or transferred to our home server what I really didn't need on this computer, uninstalled some programs, ran my cleanup programs again, and still only recovered 8GB. Something is seriously bloating my files. I'm guessing it's malware of some kind, which is why I posted in this forum.

I'm perfectly happy to follow all instructions, but I'm afraid to reboot until told to, because I have no idea what a file (or files) that big might do in a reboot. So, thanks in advance for any help you can give me!

Steph VG

[edited to add: About 15 minutes ago, I got another notification that I was quickly running out of disk space. I actually watched my C:/ drive go to 0% free space so fast it made my mind spin. I shut off the wireless connection on that computer, but then it seemed to happen again just a few minutes later. I don't want to be demanding, but I can't afford to replace my laptop - help needed very quickly!]

[edited again, at 8:15 PM EST: Ran TreeSize and found 63+GB in ProgramFiles\CommonFiles\Akamai, all of which have today's or recent (in the past few days) dates as access/change dates. I've been looking around on the web and can't find ANYTHING that would specifically tell me if I can get rid of this stuff, but I think this is the space stealer. Any thoughts on that specifically? None of my security software (including TFC and MBAM, which I added) are finding anything at all.]

Edited by chedvah77, 15 March 2010 - 06:19 PM.

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