A past customer actually remembered what I said about her computer needing a good audit check and clean up (most don’t) and asked me to fix her computer which was “running slowly”.<\/p>\n
I started it up in Ubuntu to do some backups, and and it was almost immediately apparent what was causing the obvious symptoms, the main 40GB had drive has less than 1 megabyte of space left, and the second 40GB disk was almost empty. As the household concerned has at least two teenage girls, I somewhat uncharitably thought “no surprises there”!<\/p>\n
So I did a bunch of things just to get it going, moving a few hundred megs of unnecessary stuff onto the d: drive, then running various clean ups, optimizers etc to grab back about a gigabyte, as well as clean up registries and other good to do things. But it was obvious I was never going to get much space back like that. I did a de-frag analysis, just to see how bad the disk was. knowing that there was not enough space to actually do a de-frag but interested in just why it was so slow. The bar came up almost completely red, which even for a completely full disk struck me as extreme. I had a quick look at the log, noted a couple of big files, but carried on with my planned clean ups.<\/p>\n
I was doing a windows disk clean up, watching the compress stage gradually building up the free space (up to about 2.5 gig by this time) when I decided to have a look at the log file, and print it off, as I had never really looked at a de-frag log file before. Part of the log is a list of the most fragmented files, and right at the top was a file as follows<\/p>\n
Fragments\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 File Size\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Most fragmented files
\n249,491\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 11.18 GB\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Program FilesInternet Exploreriexplore.exe.exp.log<\/p>\n
Doesn’t look good does it? About 27% of the hard drive taken up with a log file! I checked out the file, and it hadn’t been updated for a couple of years, so I figured it was safe to remove. Except that windows wouldn’t let me. So I did a quick search on the web, and there were a few others with the problem, and the most likely cause is a bug in the internet explore customer experience program, just creating huge files, eventually filling the disk.<\/p>\n
So back into Ubuntu, delete the file, replace it with an empty file of the same name and make it read only – to keep whatever is using it happy.<\/p>\n
Back in windows I now have 13.5GB of space available, more than enough to do a de-frag, and after that I will continue with the windows disk clean, and follow up with a full antivirus run, just in case there is a malware cause to this file being created. Super Anti Spyware had already shown nothing, which is always a good sign. Hopefully the result will be\u00a0 a clean, fast computer again. And girls, if you are reading this – my apologies, all that facebook, itunes etc has not yet filled the hard drive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A past customer actually remembered what I said about her computer needing a good audit check and clean up (most don’t) and asked me to fix her computer which was “running slowly”. I started it up in Ubuntu to do …<\/p>\n