ccleaner and ATF are both very good legit programs however you can over do things, and with ccleaner there is the possibility to mess with the registry which I never ever advise. As stated if you use it in the default setting and only use the cleaner feature you are ok but daily use is over kill for sure. ATF is not as big a risk since it does not have the registry cleaner feature so it is the one I more often suggest using. In the old versions of windows defrag and clean up were pretty important in the new versions much of that is automated and extra work is not nearly as essential. what I would suggest one spend more time on is making sure all the essentials are updated because these days so many infections are coming in through holes in some of these apps. So use the secuina tool every few weeks or so and make sure you stay fully updated. Secunia Online Software Inspector (OSI) and running a malwarebytes scan every few weeks (update it first) is a definite. Plus if you do not have spywareblaster in my book it is a must have, no scans to do just update it once a week then hit enable all protection so the shield is green and it sits there protecting you. SpywareBlaster

All righty then....

The only thing I can think of is to run chdsk, on the drive here's how, Start-->Run-->cmd Type in the following: CHKDSK C: /F > C:\CHKDISKLOG.TXT (note: substitute "CHKDSK C" for your drive letter) Hit your Enter key. Click YES on the popup to reboot. After CHKDSK has run type this in Start : Run... C:\CHKDISKLOG.TXT Notepad will open to allow you to view the results of Check Disk

Posted by bpgreen (My Page) on Sat, Sep 6, 08 at 23:20 The fact that Avast scanned 100 of the 27 gig on the drive tells me there may be some invalid directory listings. Go into My Computer, right click the C: drive and select properties. Then go to the tools tab and click the Check Now button. Then check both the checkboxes on the next screen and click start now. It will give you a message that it has to be in exclusive mode (I forget the wording) and that it will run the next time you restart Windows. Reboot and let it run through the entire check process. This may not be the problem, but my dad once suddenly found himself almost out of disk space and this process fixed things for him. Thanks for the information. I tried the scan. (I usually do it by putting "chkdsk /f" in Start > Run, which only goes through 3 stages at reboot; but doing it your way took it through 5 stages, so was more thorough. Nevertheless,....) Nothing showed up as being in error. My aunt took the computer to a knowledgeable friend of hers who could not discover the actual source of the problem, but was able to recover some space, so she's now at 3 GB of free space instead of 217 MB. Unfortunately, it's still below the "15%" needed to do a defrag, but at least it's more "usuable" until it can be looked at more thoroughly.