Mc PC is up to fucked up shit lately

Yeah, I don't know what's been going on lately, but it's starting to really irritate me. I couldn't point my finger on when exactly it started but it's been doing these things for a while now, good couple of weeks. I'm in a constant struggle for disk space on my C-drive where windows is located (XP Pro), that's normal for me, PC is six years old, drives aren't that big. But I'm fine with like 1,5 GB of free space on that drive. For my data and film-stuff, raw footage etc I got enough space on an external HDD.

BUT recently, things have started to go crazy on me. The available free space on my C-drive is fluctuating, bad. It can be at 900 MB when I start up the machine, then I work for a couple of minutes and suddenly the little message thing pops up telling me "there is no free space on C:" - I check and see, there is now only 190 MB free. What happened to the rest? I suspect ZoneAlarm has something to do with it but I thought I disabled the logging of alerts. Also that wouldn't explain these enormous fluctuations, or why it tends to gain free space again up after a while.

Some tasks take longer to perform now too, especially when it comes to video files in the explorer. It takes forever to generate thumbnails and I could swear the VLC player takes way longer to open than it used to. Sometimes the explorer will crash when there are divx/xvid files in a folder. I've had that before, the responsible son-of-a was the KLite Codec Pack back then, but that's long gone, so I dunno. I recently installed a lot of little tool-programs for creating/hardcoding subtitles, converting mkv files etc. I doubt any of these programs had a virus or something attached to it, but I believe at least one of them fucked something up. I uninstalled a bunch of them but there's been no change. I had also installed the standalone XviD codec for one of those little programs, but uninstalled that one too, still nothing.

These little tool-progs were:

MKVToolnix/MKVMerge

Avidemux

RMconverter

RM to AVI converter/splitter

DivXLand

ffdshow

Sometimes the PC will do Skandisk on bootup for no reason, always the C-drive.

I can't re-install the whole system right now, it's a work-computer rather than a gaming one, setting up all the little programs I need for my film work would simply take too long right now, so I'm just wondering what the hell could have gone wrong there. Something must have fucked with some settings, but what?

  On 12/23/2010 at 2:48 PM, Jonas said:

I feel bad for you son, I got 99 problems but drive space aint one :)

 

 

 

 

+ harddisks are piss cheap m8.

I guess that's true, but it's not the little space I got left that's worrying me in general, it's the sudden changes and errors. I mean, it has never been fluctuating like that before. All these weird things started at the same time.

if you're going to get your computer from mcdonalds then you should expect problems.

It's actually a fine PC and was quite high-end back in its day, it wasn't a ready-made one from the store either, I was lucky to get an IT-freak-friend to assemble it with me as I am a bit of a noob when it comes to hardware. It's just that I have used it excessively over the years so naturally some things got fucked. But this recent thing is really bothering me, which is a shame as otherwise it's still doing a great job.

Although I couldn't help myself for quoting BCM in the WATMM funny quotes thread for his reply above, I've noticed that whenever my work computers get down to a small percentage of the total hard drive space, all sorts of fucked up shit starts to happen. I don't know why, but I have the feeling that, perhaps, when running the actual amount of space diminishes (perhaps to hold open documents/work as a temporary file - maybe due to virtual memory? I don't know, I'm not a computer person really).

That being said, if you have an external hard drive, can you move a large chunk of stuff off the C: drive and see if that helps?

Also, run a couple of antivirus/malware programs - would be worth it because, even though it's probably just old computeritus, if it is a virus then you'll have identified the root problem.

I have run some virus scanners and the likes, but they don't give me any results. The weird thing is, for a long time, I have been working with only 400 MB of free space on C. Shortly before this happened (although I doubt it was what caused it), I moved some unnecessary big stuff from the drive so I got close to 2 GB of free space. Therefore it's particularly annoying that something seems to drain it so much. I mean, it does fluctuate, but there's about a Gig that's just been occupied by something, period.

Checking the task manager and CPU usage, it all relatively normal, 2-4%. There's no obvious program claiming CPU either, it's all looking normal.

Another thing I did was, immediately after I noticed some changes in MB on C, I did a search for * on the entire drive so I got a list of every file on it. That I sorted by date and took a look at the recently created/modified ones. But there's no clear cause there either. The occupied space seems to be all over the place, but how could that be possible, given that it started from one day to the other?

LOL speaking of the devil ... I just got this error-cascade

That doesn't usually happen though.

sounds like the virtual memory is eating itself at points.

advice: DELETE/MOVE shit you just don't need and give it a lot more than 2Gb space.

  On 12/23/2010 at 4:27 PM, Macca said:

sounds like the virtual memory is eating itself at points.

 

advice: DELETE/MOVE shit you just don't need and give it a lot more than 2Gb space.

this and/or your hard drive slowly dying. that's pretty close to what mine did, especially the scandisk thing.

  On 12/23/2010 at 4:28 PM, Jonas said:

In before the 'buy a mac'.

I think that was the problem in the first place.

  On 12/23/2010 at 4:55 PM, spratters said:

  On 12/23/2010 at 4:28 PM, Jonas said:

In before the 'buy a mac'.

 

I think that was the problem in the first place.

Check task manager for rogue processes that eat all your RAM and disk space (by making the swap file expand.)

As for running processes, I checked that, but I don't see any doing anything wrong. Idle Processes have 98-99% of CPU usage most of the time, unless I'm actually running something CPU heavy. I don't know what the swap-file is, I'm guessing it's the same thing the German windows calls "Auslagerungsdatei", and I have received a message once or twice telling me something like "There's not enough memory, the Auslagerungsdatei is being expanded"

And I just got a taste of the exquisite shittyness of macs so that's definitely not gonna happen.

Those errors you got are out of memory errors. If your system has to swap a lot it can get very, very slow. So I think something is eating too much memory. Sort by the memory column in process explorer, CPU usage isn't your issue.

Look for the file: pagefile.sys. It can probably be found under C:\pagefile.sys (show system files in your explorer settings, it's hidden by default) and check the size.

Or you can use something like http://windirstat.info/ to see where all your hard drive space is going.

i've had problems. i use

avira antivir

Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware

SUPERAntiSpyware Free Edition

& tuneup utilities

Download sysinternals suite, load up procmon, filter show only disk writes. Look for anything out of the ordinary that is writing to disk. Also how much of your ram capacity is being used? Could be a virtual memory space that is expanding as someone else pointed out.

Anyone suggested deleting old system restore points? Those can cause significant fluctuations in space. I would suggest changing the limit or disabling it altogether if it keeps causing problems.

  On 12/23/2010 at 9:42 PM, Ego said:

Those errors you got are out of memory errors. If your system has to swap a lot it can get very, very slow. So I think something is eating too much memory. Sort by the memory column in process explorer, CPU usage isn't your issue.

 

Look for the file: pagefile.sys. It can probably be found under C:\pagefile.sys (show system files in your explorer settings, it's hidden by default) and check the size.

 

Or you can use something like http://windirstat.info/ to see where all your hard drive space is going.

I don't see any unwanted processes claiming huge amounts of memory there ... do you? Although I don't know why firefox is using so much. Flo is me, obviously.

Now that pagefile.sys, I'm sure I've seen it before, but I can't seem to find it now. I did a complete search though all drives and got nothing. I made sure I enabled "scan hidden items" as well.

  On 12/23/2010 at 9:49 PM, yek said:

i've had problems. i use

 

avira antivir

 

Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware

 

SUPERAntiSpyware Free Edition

 

& tuneup utilities

I happen to have these exact ones except SUPERAntiSpyware. The error-pic I posted was actually an error that I saw the first time today when trying to load Tune Up (I still have the Tune Up 2007 Trial - it never runs out, but it has an increasing waiting time on start-up, which by now is set to 6400 seconds - so that can be ignored, it was just a lol)

  On 12/23/2010 at 10:03 PM, Bubba69 said:

Download sysinternals suite, load up procmon, filter show only disk writes. Look for anything out of the ordinary that is writing to disk. Also how much of your ram capacity is being used? Could be a virtual memory space that is expanding as someone else pointed out.

Not sure about the RAM capacity, I know I got 1 Gig of RAM, it says in the task manager "847 M" - could that be it? It used to be less I think.

sysinternals suite, will it log the disc writes? Cause I got a feeling these processes whatever they are are only running for a very brief amount of time and can't be caught in the act like that.

  On 12/23/2010 at 10:07 PM, NoResults said:

Anyone suggested deleting old system restore points? Those can cause significant fluctuations in space. I would suggest changing the limit or disabling it altogether if it keeps causing problems.

I think I got that disabled

edit: oh you said

does it scandisk only after an abnormal shutdown, or every boot?

It's completely random. It will do it about once every five boot ups. First I thought it had something to do with external devices, like USB sticks etc, when I just left them in when I shut down the PC, so it would "miss" these drives the next time. But that's not the reason either. I stopped doing that and it ran scandisk anyways.

i think your HDD is on the way out. you could download a free SMART diagnostic to see what it says. check the make of HDD in the BIOS and google for an appropriate one.

i had a problem like this before, turns out it was zone alarm...

search for a file called tvDebug.log - mine was up around 4 gig

go here for a fix

forums.techguy.org

if its not that, do a search on your machine for *.* but use advanced search and only show files modified in the last day or so and only show files larger than 1mb, then sort by size and you should be able to find the culprit - thats how i found tvdebug.log

the scandisk shows problems upon scanning or no?