PC Question: Has anyone else ever had this problem?

ThinkingManNeil

ThinkingManNeil

Charter Member
Hi Guys;

Something's going on with my Dell PC that's got me a little worried. I purchased a Dell Studio XPS 9000 running Windows 7 back in early March and I ordered it with an extra hard drive specifically so I could keep my flight sim stuff separate and leave the system's main 500MB drive free for everything else. The main drive as set up delivered was about 456GB before I added any extra software, and it's down to around 405GB which seems reasonable for what I have loaded into it after the amount of use it's had, but I seem to be losing huge chunks of space on my secondary drive that has all my flight sim stuff. The drive is rated at 1TB but it came in to me at 931GB (why the big difference I don't know), but currently it's rated at 732GB. The FS2004 folder on the secondary - "D" - drive is large, but certainly not 200GB's worth, and while I have a WindowsImageBackup folder there as well, I can't see it being really huge. I do regular virus scans with McAfee, use the Comodo firewall, and I defrag weekly. I'm by no stretch of the imagination a "wirehead" - in fact I know very little about computers other than surfing the net, flying my sims (I'm REALLY pissed that I can't use the earlier version of IL-2 Sturmovik with Windows 7), and chatting with friends - but I try to do the commonsense maintenance stuff that I always hear about.

Here's what's got me worried.

Yesterday my secondary drive showed 745GB of free space available, today it's down to 732. Somehow in 24 hrs I lost 13GB of disc space for reasons unknown to me. All my repeated scans show no evidence of viruses, malware, or spyware. I haven't added any new files to the disc, nor have I even played FS2004 for several days. I want to make sure my system is performing well so that I have the computer I paid for and can keep adding to my flight sim experience and perhaps add some others (eg. Orbiter)

Any advice would be genuinely appreciated.

Cheers,

N.
 
Hi,

Had you checked all the folders by using "created" tab choice..
So you can see the date of the files added on your disk
Have you some sort of backup running in background ?
13 GB in a day is not a negligeable quantity .. but I don't think it's a malware or virus ..
 
My first guess would be that you've downloaded something to your C drive and the the ghost image is being automatically backed up periodically.
 
same happened in XP

This may not help because my problem occured in XP ,but I had the same thing happen till I disabled archiveing and cut back my system restore to 1%. Granted it only gives you a few restore points ,but that worked for me. My amount of disk space has remained constant,(other than if I download a lot of stuff,
 
one last thing to check is fs9 gauges folder, for some reason whenever you
exit a session, the complete gauges pack of the panel you are using is copied, each copied gauge has file extension
something like 'XXX.0001.gau' (where XXX is gauge name).

Flightsim manager or some similar utility can clean out the un-wanted duplicates for you.

ttfn

Pete
 
This may be a bit useless, but you always want to make sure that any secondary HD is set up as just that, a "slave" drive, seperate from your primary drive. On the hard drive itself there is a set of switches that must be in the proper position for this to occur. You will have to consult the manual or contact Dell Support to have them walk you throught the procedure if you are uncertain of how to set up the secondary HD with the switches.

If you are seeing your HD space dropping on the secondary drive as well as the primary, chances are Windows is copying info onto both drives. I have had WinXP copy the "Backup-Restore" log to my secondary HD before, and flipping the switches on the back of the secondary drive did the trick.

Hope that helps...

BB686:USA-flag:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top