i recently received a warning that the c: drive on my 8890 was running low on disk space (using xp pro). i have it partitioned at 9.76 gb and showed that i only had 840 mb available. i only have the operating system on this drive and when i look at the properties for each individual folder, the total size is under 4gb. where is the remaining 4+ gb? i ran disk cleanup and defragged, but could not free up much more space. i finally opted to compress the drive and that got me to just over 3 gb of free space, but where is the rest? the main thing i use my computer for is to run ms access and the file can get over 1 gb before being compacted. could there be swap file space being used up by this program even though the database file is saved in another directory?

any suggestions or comments will be greatly appreciated.

steve

There's always a swap file, but how large is up to you. You can set it in Settings. However, based on what you write, it would have to be close to a 4 GB swap file which may be too big or if that's size is warranted by what you do, your partition is too small.

It could also be you have some unauthorized files on there taking up space. Who knows what. You need to change your settings to reveal all files, hidden and system as well. That may locate something.

thx marquisdarquis. i have always had the folder options set to display hidden files and system files, so it was not that i was not able to view any missing folders. i changed the directory for the swap file, so i will see if that makes a difference. if it comes to it, i will probably try re-installing the os.

Where I've found disk space gets eaten up is in the swap file, the hibernation file (hiberfil.sys - if hibernation is enabled), system restore files (check Control Panel->System->System Restore to see how much space is allocated for that) and browser cache. These are all adjustable in some sense (you can move them, disable them, or reduce the amount of space they use up).

Sounds like you would have found all these, though, by checking all folder sizes. Of course, swap and hiberfil.sys aren't in a "folder" - they're at the top-level - so they may have escaped your search.

Also, if you are running Fat32, your file system won't allocate space as efficiently, especially since your partition is > 9gig. In this cae, move to NTFS if you can.

-Peter