The first thing I would do is to check the disk for errors.

Right click on the drive in windows Explorer or My computer. Select Properties. Go to the tools tab and click the button to Check Now. You will probably need to reboot.

Another thing to check is your recycle bin. If you delete things, they aren't really deleted until you remove them from your recycle bin.

Did you create a new partition on the hard drive to accommodate the second operating system? How big did you make that? Did you wipe the drive using Fdisk then creating 2 or more partitions?

With only 3 gigs left you do not even have enough to create the volatile swap file so the computer will struggle to even run let alone allow you to run tasks. Might pay to go into Add/Remove programs and see what you do not need there the do disk cleanup and defrag. You might also consider running your anti virus and anti spyware programs to see if you have unwanted visitors.

If you download the trial version on DISKdata. It will give you full details and a graphical display of where all your files are located and how much space they occupy. (It takes a short while to search through all the files before displaying the results.)

Colin

Here is a link that might be useful: DISKdata for Windows

Don't forget to empty the recycle bin you don't gain disk space until you do.

Thank you very much, Colin. Looks interesting. I'll give it a try.

I'd run ccleaner on both OS's and see how much that gets rid of.

After you have been surfing the web for awhile, a lot of temporary files gets stored on disk. Some of these are used to quickly display the contents of re-occuring frames on a page.

You can clean up your hard drives with a built-in utiltiy in Windows. Double-click "My Computer" (or single click depending on your settings).

My Computer> right click on a hard drive> properties>
Disk Cleanup.

The system will compute the amount of space used by temporary files and display the results.

Highlight (click on the selection box) the files you'd like to remove, then click "ok" or "apply" whichever is applicable.

The two biggest space hogs are:

Temporary Internet Files

Temporary Files

These can be safely removed, however, there may be minor information 'remembered' in these files. The next time an old site is re-visited, it may take a little more time to load the page because it is starting with a clean slate. As you brouse, new files get written to the temporary space on your disk.

Another file that can grow to large size is the browsing "history" file. This is the file where the URLs( addresses of sites visited) are kept. There are user settings to control the size of this file. To access in Win XP:

Control Panel > Internet Options > General Tab >

On the general tab, find "Browsing History" and click on "settings". Near the bottom of the "settings" panel, find "no. of days" to keep history. A common setting is 20 days. Set this to whatever you like. Addresses (URLs) older than the setting will be dropped off the list.

These are the addresses that appear in the drop-down list when you click on the down caret next to the address box at the top of your browser.

I have seen in several cases like this that it is for some reason the system restore file size allocation that has taken over the space, in the system restore settings area you can use a slider to tell it how much space to use for system restore points, you do not want to shrink it too much but it may have gotten changed somehow. You can try re-setting the slider then apply the settings and reboot. Do not ever set it below 1% is the general rule.

there is a really good free program that will show you exactly where the big file hogs are on your pc.
Xinorbis

and another easy one
Folder Size

you can go to pcpitstop and try running these 2 scans the OverDrive and the Optimize scans and see what they say.

Here is a link that might be useful: pcpitstop scans

opps forgot to give the link on how to change the restore size.
How to Reclaim Some Disk Space in Windows XP

I caution people to make sure your system restore is working properly anytime you do a change to it, just go and try creating a restore point to make sure it did work and it is working ok. Also do not flush out the old restore points till everything is ok because then you have nothing to go back to.
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