My daughter has amassed a very large folder (7.60 gig or 82,000+ jpg files) of screenshots for some unknown reason. Teenagers! I am trying to delete them but can't seem to get much accomplished
due to the fact that explorer.exe takes up 98 - 100% of the processing power and constantly locks up. I can delete a few at a time with no problem, but I'll be here until I'm older and grayer if I do it this way. I have also tried booting into Safe Mode to see if I would have better luck, but I was mistaken. I get the same results.
Not sure if i m allowed to reply in here so do beg the pardon of the admins if i am not
Have you tried the command prompt yet.You can try the following using the command prompt/DOS mode but since you have not mention the Windows Operating system(OS) version its a bit difficult for me to say if those commands exist in the OS that you use
First try this
Open a command prompt and type the following
RMDIR /S /Q [DRIVE LETTER:]Full path of the folder
WARNING: /S switch will remove all the sub folders under the parent folder and because of the usage of /Q it will do that silently
If that did not work try the following
DEL /S /Q [DRIVE LETTER:]full path of the folder\*.jpg
Since you mentioned about JPG file i added only that extension
WARNING: /S switch will remove all the sub folders under the parent folder and because of the usage of /Q it will do that silently
You can get more info on both the commands by using /? on the command prompt
eg : RMDIR /? or DEL /?
Thanks for the reply. She is running Windows XP SP3
File path - C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\TARGET FILE NAME - (I don't know the exact file name as I don't have the computer in front of me.)
So would this be correct:
RMDIR /S /Q [C:]Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\TARGET FILE NAME
I should have mention this in my previous post so sorry for that
RMDIR is for deleting an entire folder/directory not just a single file or files
Since it seems the files in question are in users application folder DO NOT USE THE RMDIR COMMAND as it will remove the entire APPLICATION DATA FOLDER and will cause major problems!!!!!!
But if the JPG files are inside of a folder say MY Pictures\folder1 then you can use RMDIR command to use the folder named "Folder1"
In your situation i think its best to use the DEL command.So far to my knowledge no software save s JPG files directly under the folder under APPLICATION DATA folder.But do check if you need any of the JPG files saved under there before executing the following as it will remove all JPG file from APPLICATION DATA folder.
When you are sure do the following in the command prompt
DEL C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\*.jpg /q
You can get more information and usage of the DEL command from here
Hi Doug
Thank you very much for the friendly welcome.
I may not be able to spend much time here because I need to focus on my training at Malware removal uni.But as a system s administrator I love solving technical issues as well.
I have already sent a PM to my teachers and awaiting on their reply. If it is allowed I would try my best to provide my assistance in here even though it may not be frequent.
Regards
m-r-u
My guess is that because the file(s) are so big, the system can't delete them into the bin, what I suspect would happen is if you allowed it the time to figure out space required etc, you would probably get a message saying it's to big to put in the bin, and it will ask if you want to delete it permanently, this is what I suspect is happening anyway.
But a non tech way is what you have already done, but instead of individual files, or even a few lines, do large amounts, eg lets say there are 10,000 files, highlight say 1000 at a time and delete them, then repeat, then after several goes try deleting the lot in one go again, and repeat until the number gets down to a small enough amount the system can deal with it faster than you've already experienced, also run some file cleaners to get shot of junk and temp files, it will help the system deal with this better, the alternate is deleting in dos mode (as per above), but going into dos on booting may be a better way, then you can run the del or deltree commend, but be warned it is unforgiving, tell it the wrong file\folder and it's gone.
What I would do if going in from dos is use the dir command, then cd to the next folder name, then repeat until you reach the folder you want to delete (assuming they are in a folder other than the My Pic's one), that way you have the full address to use with the del command, but it's not for the faint hearted, hope you get it sorted anyway.
After all these years you would think Microsoft would have the bugs and efficiency worked out of Windows Explorer. However, they do not. Not only can Explorer not handle more than a thousand files or so efficiently (if you have a lot of RAM!), it also has many bugs where it cannot or will not display the filenames properly. Anybody ever seen two or three identically named files show up in explorer? I have.. And trust me, the filenames WERE NOT named the same at a command prompt. How about strangely named files that you cannot delete no matter what you do from Explorer? You'll get a strange error message about not being able to find the file. You can delete it from the command prompt without any issues whatsoever.
In this situation, with the OP having 80,000 files, there is no way he will be able to use explorer to delete them unless he does a few at a time. Which is ridiculous. If I needed to deal with this issue I would definitely use the DEL command from the command prompt.
It would be nice for the OP (that's you, the guy with the problem. :)) to verify exactly which folder those files are in so that one of the techs here can craft a command specifically taylored for where your files are located that you want to remove. I've never seen an occasion like this where that many user saved .jpg's were located under application data. That is truly strange. However, if your teenager uses Mozilla Firefox, I believe it stores its temporary internet files in a folder in that location. Is it possible this is what you are looking at? Temporary internet files would look like "screenshots" of all the different webpages and graphics that have been viewed on-line. If that is the case, the temporary internet files can be deleted using Mozilla Firefox. Either way, you need to be careful as to what you delete in this location.
I truly appreciate all the responses in helping me try to resolve this issue.
She is running Windows XP SP 3, she using Mozilla Firefox as her browser.
She has saved these screenshots as jpg images and they are in a numbered folder (assigned, note created by her) within the Application Data folder in the following path.
File path - C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\TARGET FILE NAME
Where the TARGET FILE NAME would be the assigned numbered folder name I'm referring to. That's the folder I want to delete and all it's contents
Thanks for spelling it out EXACTLY as I will need to type it in. I won't have access to her computer again until next Monday, so we will have to wait until then to see what my results are.
Thanks to everyone else, m-r-u, 8210GUY, Doug for your comments and suggestions on this topic.
No problem OCD.. I only reiterated what the valuable information the other techs have already provided.
Be sure that you change the, "TARGET FILE NAME" to match the actual name of the folder. I'm sure you caught that though.
EDIT: You've been around a while.. I thought you were new!
I'm not getting e-mail notifications for some reason.
Yes.. You can make the *.jpg into *.* to delete everything. This will not remove the folders. YOu can delete the folders in windows explorer after you empty out all the junk that was causing you problems.
My guess is that because the file(s) are so big, the system can't delete them into the bin, what I suspect would happen is if you allowed it the time to figure out space required etc, you would probably get a message saying it's to big to put in the bin, and it will ask if you want to delete it permanently, this is what I suspect is happening anyway.
Just wondering, if the file(s) are to big for the bin, could one use the SHIFT-DELETE to delete so many files? Of course they would not be retrieveable again if needed. Just curious about it. Never encountered a situation like this, thats all
Cheers
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