raprice
Topic Starter
Hello all, appreciate this forum very much. I have XP Pro on my old Dell Optiplex, P4; 3Ghz, 1G Ram, 40g HDD, which I bought used with nothing but the OS and a few utilities on it for a work machine. I have broadband access via a home router and had only had it a month when I got a virus that ate up all the free space down to less than 1G, (when what I had on the machine took up less than 5G) in one day. I was using AVG free, Spybot S&D, and had gotten by with this for a very long time on my other machines. I downloaded Malwarebytes and got rid of the virus (I think) and got various other tools for recovering the drive.
NOTHING has worked to recover the hard drive's eaten up space. Fortunately, I keep all my work files on a removable drive, so I could wipe the drive and start over, but the used machine came preloaded with a valid copy of XP and no disks, so I'd prefer not to have to do that. I've been limping along with the drastically reduced space (using the removable drive), but am frustrated by this problem.
I purchased Norton 2010 and Advanced System Optimizer 3 and ran both of them multiple times, but still cannot retrieve the trashed HDD space. I downloaded Treesize Free and can see that all folders have been artificially inflated in size (e.g., Windows folder is 4.9 gig, now) but cannot see anything to eliminate without doing damage.
This is the most perplexing situation and in doing research on the 'net, I've seen dozens of posts by others similarly struck–and stuck. Probably not worth the headache of trying to fix the drive, but the stubborn part of me wants to know how to undo this kind of damage.
I partitioned off part of the drive to save it from more damage, but that really hasn't solved my space issue. Keep having to work with 1-2 gig free space.
Thanks for any light you can shed.
NOTHING has worked to recover the hard drive's eaten up space. Fortunately, I keep all my work files on a removable drive, so I could wipe the drive and start over, but the used machine came preloaded with a valid copy of XP and no disks, so I'd prefer not to have to do that. I've been limping along with the drastically reduced space (using the removable drive), but am frustrated by this problem.
I purchased Norton 2010 and Advanced System Optimizer 3 and ran both of them multiple times, but still cannot retrieve the trashed HDD space. I downloaded Treesize Free and can see that all folders have been artificially inflated in size (e.g., Windows folder is 4.9 gig, now) but cannot see anything to eliminate without doing damage.
This is the most perplexing situation and in doing research on the 'net, I've seen dozens of posts by others similarly struck–and stuck. Probably not worth the headache of trying to fix the drive, but the stubborn part of me wants to know how to undo this kind of damage.
I partitioned off part of the drive to save it from more damage, but that really hasn't solved my space issue. Keep having to work with 1-2 gig free space.
Thanks for any light you can shed.
