Hello I'm trying to fix a friends computer and I'm noticing that Drive C keeps losing space every few mintues which is really strange. It a sony vaio computer and has two hard drives labeled C and D. The D drive has over 8 gigs of free space but the C drive is down to a shocking 128KB!!!!! I need help, I've tried running 2 different virus checks and found nothing, Ad ware found over 800 files but I can't delete them all without running into a program not responding.

Boot to safe mode then run ad-aware and spybot S&D. i_XpUser

You can't delete them because there is not enough free space left to do so. You have to delete files without putting them in the recycle bin. It is amazing that the computer can even operate with that little of free space left. Since the 800 files that Ad-Aware found are likely "cookies" - navigate to the folder where the cookies are stored, highlight them all and hold down the Shift key while you click on Delete to remove the files without putting them in the recycle bin. You need to clear out as many unnecessary files as you can in this method to free up enough space for the operating system to run properly and to allow you to run programs to find out what is going on with your friends computer. If your friend is using Norton and has enabled the Norton protected Recycle Bin feature - you can be emptying out the Recycle Bin and deleting files but they are not permanently removed - Norton is hiding them in case you want them back again and they are taking up space somewhere - at least that is what I have read here on the forum that it does. This may explain why the more you delete the more hard drive is being used up.

Gabe, I must admit that cleo does have a better grip with the problem than I do. Nice post, cleo :-) i_XpUser

Thanks, I ran into a problem with a computer that too little hard drive space left - she had over 30,000 temporary internet files on her hard drive and due to lack of free space I could not just delete them all at once. I had to delete small groups of files at a time until I had freed up enough space to clear them all out. That was Windows 98 and before I knew about holding down the Shift Key and hitting Delete :)

As an FYI, my Recycle bin rarely gets anything. I like the Shift-del key combination. It's easier but sometimes unwise because once its deleted its gone for good - no chance to undo. I always first make sure I'm not drunk, or half-sleeping, or in a bad mood etcetra before I actually zap those files. i_XpUser

Everything is retrievable if you want it bad enough and are willing to pay for it but I believe that when I have used System Restore to roll back my XP to an earlier date, files I had since deleted do return to my hard drive in that process. I just upgraded our servers to 2003 and enabled shadow copies - when a file is deleted over the network it is gone for good but with shadow copies, you can check back to see the state of a folder at a earlier time and restore the files or folders that were accidently deleted. I enabled this feature about two weeks ago and it has twice been used to restore a file successfully.