Perplexing laptop....

[Cameronian]

My better half has an obsolescent Compaq running Vista. It has a 100Gb hard disc and 1Gb of memory. In spite of having been a programmer of the very old school (KDF9!), she's just little interested in protecting and caring for it. I have taken advantage of her periodic absences to set up the Windows firewall, free Avast, Spybot and the free version of Malwarebytes. All of these are kept very up to date and Malwarebytes and Spybot get run manually once a week for a full scan, with very, very few catches. Inevitably the hard disc is filling up and increasing sluggishness made me install and run CrapCleaner and Defraggler fairly often, bringing a fairly dramatic improvement when first used and this improvement has pretty well stuck, with only a few small ups and downs since.

So far so good and so standard but there is something happening now and again which seems odd to me. When I first began using CrapCleaner and Defraggler the hard disc was about two thirds full and the machine ran acceptably well. On one occasion about three months ago I ran CrapCleaner having selected the option to wipe any free space. When that finally finished I ran Defraggler and found that the hard disc was now only about 40% full - I had found almost 30Gb new free space! Now that seems a pretty significant amount, in the context of a 100Gb disc - especially as it had never happened before, even though the same combination of clean-up stuff had been run each time. I put it down to the wiping of the free space, smiled happily and went about my business. The free space stayed about the same through the next few weekly cleanups.

However, a month later I noticed while defragging that the disc space used had gone back up to about 70% again in the space of one week. Odd, I thought.

Well, she's off to the UK for a week so I've got her machine to myself and I ran CrapCleaner and then Defraggler and, Hey Ho!, the occupation is back down to 45% so I've turned the b***dy thing off again and will probably leave it like that until she gets back!

But that doesn't tell me what's happening..... Can anybody advise, please?

[Spurlash2]

When you run CCleaner, make a note of the cleaning that will take place.

My guess is that the Missus may do a lot of surfing/deleting of files etc. Browsers like Chrome build up a large internet cache and IE temp files grow quite quickly.

Also, when you save a file to your hard drive it is written to what is called contiguous blocks, that is, block a, block b, block c, and so on. But if your hard drive is low on space then the file system can not always write your file to contiguous blocks, and so you get files strewn everywhere, and a fragmented hard drive. Your action of a defrag puts it all back again.

I reckon.

[Cameronian]

Thanks for your thoughts, Spurlash2. That's one of the problems, Madame deletes absolutely nothing! She does seem to choose Chrome (another issue!) but doesn't surf a lot at all. She mainly plays hour upon hour of online bridge. I only recently stopped deleting her internet cache and some other things because she never closes anything - often having well over 30 tabs open at once - and gets upset whenever my cleaning means that she opens Chrome to find an empty screen....

In any event I don't think that the accumulated internet cache could ever approach 30Gb in a week. The other consideration is that her computing behaviour absolutely doesn't change from one week to the next so these enormous swings couldn't be explained in that way.

I'm not convinced by your other point either (sorry!), assuming I have understood it correctly, because the fragmentation to which you rightly refer doesn't really consume extra space but just slows everything down because the head has to chase around so much more to assemble what is required. You can confirm that by watching the free/used space figures or the pie chart as the defragmenter does its work. Moving blocks about to new and more efficient locations doesn't significantly alter the total space used for the data. I'd wondered if the first time the drop in used space occurred because I had chosen the option to wipe the free space, almost as if the unwiped free space had in some way been recognised as full, but this last time the same huge fall happened without wiping.

There must be an explanation, though.

[cdtaylor_nats]

You didn't by any chance remove the swap file? Windows would reinstate it as soon as required.

[Cameronian]

I'm sorry cdtaylor nats, but I don't know what you mean.

[mixture]

running Vista. 1Gb of memory.

What's the memory usage like on it ?

Vista is just ghastly on memory usage, so you may find it's been using space on your hard drive for additional memory (this is the "swap" that the other poster referred to )

[Cameronian]

Hi mixture. What shows up as Memoria Física (it's in Spanish but corresponds to the Page File Usage History graph on My XP) is sitting pretty steady at 44 to 46% when pretty well nothing is going on. At the same time the processor usage is rapidly and constantly jumping all over the place from 2% to 70% with bursts to 100% fairly often.

When I've see the hard drive occupation it's via the pie chart on the main page of Defraggler and when I have that running I have everything manually controllable turned off always, so that much is a constant and the computer should always be doing as near to nothing as the OS and the startup menu allow. Right now I booted it to get then figures to answer your question and closed down even the two very small things which she-who-must-be-obeyed won't let me disable on the startup menu, yet still the CPU use is jumping all over the place as I described above.

[ex_matelot]

I'd try an online virus scan such as housecall.

[Cameronian]

Hi ex matelot. Thank you for your suggestion. The computer has Windows firewall, Avast free version and Spybot, all up to date and running live with, additionally, frequent on demand running of Malwarebytes and CrapCleaner. What is that HouseCall brings to the party, please, which isn't already covered?

cdtaylor nats and mixture, I don't understand this "swap" issue because I've never heard of it but could this explain hard drive usage swings of 30Gb - especially on such a small capacity machine? Did you suggest it in response to Madame often having 30+ tabs open in Chrome?

[Saab Dastard]

The swap file is normally a maximum of twice physical RAM - 30GB is way too much for a swap file (unless she has way too much physical RAM. of course)!

Is it possible that she is using some form of peer-to-peer file sharing (knowingly or not)? That could rack up large disk usage pretty quickly.

The security precautions you have in place would suggest that it isn't a zombie PC hosting files, but P2P could be allowed even with all the precautions you have in place.

SD

[Cameronian]

Hi Saab Dastard - I always smile at that name! Madame does no P2P - well, not knowingly, anyway. In any event, I don't see how my running Malwarebytes, Spybot, CrapCleaner and Defraggler one time each in her absence is likely to clear out half of the content of her hard disc, assuming that this content is "normal" content. Each time it has happened, the numbers have been more or less the same; It has used space in the seventies of Gb at first and ends up down in the high thirties or low forties of Gb. When you consider that there's a lot of space permanently filled with software, it means that the space filled with data drops to around a half each time.

She doesn't have extra memory, only a total of 1Gb, as I mentioned earlier. That would appear to put the kibosh on the swap file being the explanation unless it fails to clear the stuff swapped onto the hard disc each session so that it accumulates. Is that possible? Then would Crapcleaner clear it all out once a month or so, when I get my hands on it?

[Saab Dastard]

unless it fails to clear the stuff swapped onto the hard disc each session so that it accumulates. Is that possible? Then would Crapcleaner clear it all out once a month or so, when I get my hands on it?

In a word, no.

Without knowing what "crap" "crapcleaner" is "cleaning", it's all speculation.

I suspect that it is all down to temporary internet files and browser cache.

Another possibility is something doing very verbose logging - I've seen servers with 3/4 million log files filling the system disk - but unlikely on a home PC.

Tell us what CC is set to do, and then maybe try it with only one option ticked, then 2 etc. until you see what process reclaimed a humungous wodge of disk space (that's a technical IT term, btw).

SD

[vulcanised]

I wonder if this JAM Software - Windows Freeware (http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/) would indicate where all the space is going?

Used it myself a few times over the years and it's very useful (and it's free).

[Cameronian]

Hi once again Saab Dastard.

I'm sorry but I have given the wrong impression for you to deduce that it was CrapCleaner which wiped off the 30Gb each time. I still have absolutely no idea how or when the 30Gb disappeared each time. I just discovered that the hard disc occupation had dropped by the time I looked at it on occasion. I usually looked at the machine when I wanted to do a general clean up, including CrapCleaner.

Immediately before my wife's return Defraggler showed that a little over 40Gb of hard disc space was used and about 65Gb free. 24 hours later, with her normal usage in the meantime, opening Defraggler showed that the hard disc's used space now amounted to 62Gb. I ran CrapCleaner and it cleaned out not very much, about 140Mb.

I then ran a "Quick Defrag" which reduced a starting 13% fragmentation with 91 fragmented files totalling 7.5Gb and with 434 fragments to still 13% fragmentation, 6 fragmented files still totalling 7.3Gb but only 74 fragments. The total hard disc occupation was still about 62Gb.

I then ran a "Full Defrag" and the stats, as time went by, were as follows:-

30 minutes, HDD occupation up by 2Gb to 64Gb, fragmentation figures unchanged
60 minutes, HDD occupation up by 4Gb to 66Gb, fragmentation figures unchanged but process shown as 34% done
70 minutes, HDD occupation up by 6Gb to 68Gb, fragmentation figures unchanged
120 mins, 8Gb to 70Gb, now 352 fragments but still 6 files fragmented
150 mins, almost 10Gb to 71.5 Gb, now 52 fragments and 4 fragmented files, 4.6Gb, "Finished"!

I then ran Windows Defragmenter which finished, satisfied with the tidy-up, after only five minutes.

I can imagine no explanation. It's worth noting that on absolutely each of the dozens of times I have run Defraggler on my own XP machine, the figures for used and unused space on my disc remain effectively unchanged throughout the process and it ends with 0% fragmentation, 0 fragmented files and 0 fragments.

[Cameronian]

Thank you vulcanised, I had a look at Jam but I'm not sure about it so will set it aside for now. I may give it a closer look later.

[Cameronian]

It has gone awfully quiet.......

I hope, SD especially, that my evening spent observing the thing working has generated information which will make the failing more (rather than less!) obvious.

[Saab Dastard]

I suspect that there may be a problem with the file system. I wonder if there might be cross-linkages or orphaned file fragments that are generated in use and then removed by the defragmentation process.

What I suggest is a full backup, preferably a disk clone as well, and then run chkdsk - you'll find that the system disk (presumably C:) can only be analysed by chkdsk after a reboot, so allow for that.

Be warned that this may find and fix corrupted files, index entries etc. and the repair can affect system files, requiring recovery work (hence the full backup and disk clone).

You can run it just to investigate, but since it won't tell you what files are affected if it finds disk errors, you have no way of knowing what damage may be caused by repairing anyway.

Of course you could just wipe the disk and start with a clean format and re-install, but it's much less fun! :)

Another approach would be to use software like WinINSTALL / LE (free) to take a snapshot of your system, then another snaphsot some time later (in your case it might be days or weeks later). The software automatically compares the two snapshots and can generate a report of the differences (files and registry entries). It's geared towards package installation, but it might be helpful for you to analyse the changes.

SD

[Cameronian]

Yet again, "Oooerrr!". It's dinner time here Saab Dastard so I'll have to come back to it later, wine allowing, to think about that..... But thank you. The whole thing just seems to be so weird.

You suggested that the defrag was removing orphaned fragments (I think you meant) but the defrag process added 10Gb to the 20Gb which had already been added by Madame's interfering (!). Defraggler, on this occasion at least, hadn't removed anything. Indeed I think it odd that it should add or remove anything in any event. All should remain the same in terms of space used, surely?

[vulcanised]

Might be worth trying Auslogics defragger. It's possibly the fastest of its kind, and the change might throw up something interesting.

Disk Defrag - Fast and Safe Defragmenter for Your Disks (http://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/)

[Spurlash2]

Do you have System Restore (SR) enabled?

Might be worth unticking the box and see how that goes.

Vista has a snagette with SR, as it can be a bit of a resource hog.

Click the : Start button| type: 'System Restore' in the search box, and click your way through the offerings.

I don't believe you have a snag with your computer, just that some settings might need a tweak.

Report back.

PS. You still haven't said what CCleaner removes.

[ex_matelot]

I had all of the above problems on my other laptop. Solved them all by sticking in a Win7 disk and choosing the upgrade option.

Everything was kept and I could access everything 10 times quicker also.

[Cameronian]

Thankyou for your ideas. I'm sorry but I've been away a lot over the last two days and have been golfing and partying for the rest of the time. What a tough life!

I'll certainly have a look at that defragmenter, thank you, vulcanised.

CrapCleaner removes very little, Spurlash2, as I said above in my detailed report posting. It seems to be use and Defraggler which has been adding the Gbs!
Perhaps you mean which little boxes I have checked for its working; most of the obvious stuff but Madame doesn't like me cleaning things like internet cache and browsing history. I certainly have nothing adventurous ticked. I can't get my hands on the offending laptop at this moment but I'm pretty sure that System Restore will be enabled. I don't understand how you think that this might be affecting things though. I am seeing swings from 40 to most recently 75Gb which virtually amounts to doubling disc usage,after all.

That seems a good idea in any event by my book, ex matelot, Vista has a really bad reputation and I have wondered if the old MS offer of reverting to XP might be a good idea on such a space-limited machine (if it can be done without losing everything) but I hadn't thought of W7.

[Cameronian]

Hi vulcanised. I went to the Auslogic website and went to start to download the defragmenter's exec file and this was interrupted with the advice that I should use their speed booster first so I took that advice and ran what appeared to be a two week free trial. It came up with a big number of junk files and one or two other things but told me that they thought that fragmentation wasn't a problem and invited me to click to fix the 15,000 junk files. As soon as I did they said, effectively, "well, actually, we're not going to let you do that - you may fix 15 of them but to do more you've got to cough up the nearly $50 for a working version though they would give me a small discount if I did it absolutely right now but that offer was absolutely not repeatable". When I uninstalled it 30 seconds later they did in fact repeat that unrepeatable offer - actually I think it was a marginally better discount this time. I'm sorry but that type of "chancer's" approach is exactly what I hate so I continued with the uninstall and shall never darken their door again. I suspected more or less what I got when I saw that their original intro page had lots of the text jumbled up and scribbled over other bits so that parts were more or less unreadable. They had obviously read the book on "How to get yourself a justifiably bad name!" I'm afraid I didn't go back for their defragmenter. Indeed the only useful thing which I got out of the exercise was that the speed booster said that my drive didn't need defragging! However, thank you for what was certainly very well meant advice.

Saab Dastard, it has taken me these few days for me to realise that I had already actually noticed that while the full Defraggler gave me the very odd behaviour whose listing surely bored everyone to death, the Quick Defraggler behaved exactly as I should expect with the used/unused stats remaining absolutely unchanging throughout the process - stranger and stranger.......

[vulcanised]

Sorry to hear about your experience !

I have learned that, when going for these things always ignore the siren calls on the way.