sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Computers & Programming Computers, Software, Accessories cleaning up Hardrvie Vista home

I'm trying to help a friend clean up her hardrive , currently @66 gb used 280 mb available

She's in another state so its remote assistance . I cant actually sit at the keyboard we have run disk cleanup and its not finidng much

we went through widows explorer and couldn't find much there

is there a way to look at the contents of C drive and go from there ?

any other suggestions ?

OS is vista home premium

You can start with Ccleaner to clean up temp files. It cleans up quite a bit more than the Windows Hard Drive Cleaner tool.

https://www.piriform.com

Next I would install Treesize to take a better look at the files in the hard drive and you may be able to find some files that can be deleted. I can't really tell you what to delete since I dont know whats important and whats not but Treesize is a great tool to use and it will give you a visual indication of where large files or folders may be lurking.

https://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml

If she doesn't need to uninstall any Windows Updates that have been applied (in most cases probably not esp. for older updates from 2008/2009, then you can delete the backup files safely. That might free up a bit of room.

https://ask-leo.com/can_ntuninstall_folders_be_deleted.html

Aside from that, she should probably purchase an external harddrive and move her data over. Or have someone install a new larger harddrive in her computer and copy the data from old to new. Keep old drive as a slave or get an external enclosure to put it in for backups.

well, I got a free 30 day trial of go to my PC and I'm going to try to go in remotely tomorrow

I was thinking on the way home tonight that if she has the restore discs formatting and reinstalling may be the best option . she does have external drive and I can talk her thought backing up her data to it

I'm now suspecting there may be a virus at play , when I was working with her the other day we had it up to 280 mb free , now she says its only a KB

thanks for the suggestions guys Ill give them a try

Skip, you might also like to look at logmein.com - They have a free remote control option that does 90% of what most people need.

Piriform CCleaner (as mentioned by tito1411) is an excellent cleaner (and it does a few other things as well).

If you suspect the machine has malware, check out both(!) Spybot Search & Destroy at https://www.safer-networking.org/ and Malware Byte's Anti-Malware https://www.malwarebytes.org/

Both are free.

Microsoft offers some decent antivirus at https://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/ for free, of course.

Have a day!
Tod.

thanks I'll try logmein maybe it takes less space than gotomypc

I was able to get in using logmein and moved 13 gb of pictures to the 300 gb external drive that she thought the pictures where stored in

3+ hrs and we both had enough .. I'll do another remote session and run the suggested programs It was odd because my mouse clicks didn't always work with the technician panel and sometimes there where pop ups she could see that I couldn't so I need her there for the session

I would like to see 30 or so gigs free

Cool! It's probably already so much more usable now!

LogMeIn does have an issue with some information balloons not showing up, unfortunately. I'm sorry, it slipped my mind when I recommended it. I'm still pleased with the quality, for the free product though.

Not sure why mouse clicks wouldn't be registered. That is weird...

yea Tod, no complaints about the free product It got the job done

the mouse stuff was weird I'm clicking away and nothings happening so I ask her to click and it works other times my mouse worked fine

it was still a lot better than having her try to tell me what she saw

With LogMeIn you have to remember it may be a slow connection with a slow refresh rate.