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#61
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Windows folder excessively large
On 9/11/2018 10:32 PM, Ken Springer wrote:
On 9/11/18 7:07 PM, Zaidy036 wrote: On 9/11/2018 4:38 PM, Ken Springer wrote: On 9/10/18 9:56 PM, Paul wrote: Ken Springer wrote: I patiently ran through the rest of the folder, looking for something that seemed out of whack.Â* Couldn't find anything, so I went looking elsewhere. I think someone in this thread mentioned the hidden folders, so I turned them on.Â* To my huge surprise, I discovered the AppData folder was taking up half the 120GB drive, 60GB +. Can this be right? I'm also thinking my memory of the size of the Windows folder is in error. A basic install of a modern Windows OS is around 10GB total. That's if you reduce the pagefile to 1GB or less. And you switch off hibernation. Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* powercfg /h off The Win10 VM in front of me, the AppData in my account contains 1.5GB of files. My W10 AppData folder is just 693 MB.Â* So how does his AppData folder get to be 62 GB? There's got to be something disastrously wrong here. The next time we get together, I'm going to peek in the folder, see what's there.Â* The only program he has installed, as listed in Programs and Features, if Office 365 Home and Student. Looking at my AppData folder, in the subfolders I see folders for programs that are no longer installed.Â* Why?Â* Did the uninstall routine simply not remove them? There must be some way, other than guesswork, to compare what's installed to the data in AppData folder, and delete what is no longer needed. About 900MB of that AppData, is a Thunderbird profile with News and Mail folders. Some people can hold onto large quantities of email, and perhaps that's what your perp is hiding on you. Todd can tell you stories about people with 25-30GB of mail. It happens. His email is Gmail, and he accesses it via Firefox, IIRC.Â* No email client is installed, except The mail client that comes with W10, which I don't think he would even know how to use. He is definitely not computer knowledgeable.Â* :-( Another possibility might be a cache for a browser. My brother managed to jack up the size of one of those caches once, that it dragged the machine down to its knees. I'll see what Firefox says about the cache size the next time we have a Teamviewer session. ******* Note: If you do find email is the culprit, don't Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* be in a rush. Large email folders have been Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* known to corrupt when you tidy or compact them. Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* *Make sure* to back up the machine before Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* attempting email maintenance on something that Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* large. Â*Â*Â*Â*Â* Paul Gmail may be configured for both POP and IMAP and Tbird may be using IMAP while FireFox is using POP causing the difference in Profile size. As I said, he doesn't use an email client.Â* So, wouldn't POP and IMAP be irrelevant? Not sure. I use Gmail web mail POP but have T-Bird running with IMAP as a backup -- Zaidy036 |
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#62
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Windows folder excessively large
On 8/27/18 7:08 AM, Ken Springer wrote:
I've got a friend with Windows 10 on a recent Dell laptop. He's currently on the road, so as of this writing, I can't get you the latest and greatest info about the system. I do know the latest W10 update is not installed due to insufficient space. His Windows folder is just over 70GB in size! And his hard drive is just 120GB, an SSD. The drive in my computer is just over 20GB. Ran some of the typical clean up programs, found nothing. Virus scan, SuperAntiSpyware, Adware Cleaner, and Malwarebytes. Not a single issue found. Hard Drive Sentinel found 0 problems with the drive. IIRC, I even turned on hidden files and folders, found nothing. I'm looking for ideas as to how to discover what is using up the space, or at least telling W10 the space is in use. I considered just resetting the system, but we have to find a product key or two, as well as make sure he knows his Windows sign in information. Still on the trail of the space hog on this computer. We were able to connect via Teamviewer last night. Using TreeSize, I was able to track down the biggest space hog. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ik8d15rkm...3jXpRti0a?dl=0 AppDataLocalPackages contains over 60GB of data. Surely, something has gone wrong. The package that has the 60GB pf data that seems related to Microsoft Edge. Info I've found on removing the packages folder seems to be all over the place. -- Ken Mac OS X 10.11.6 Firefox 59.0.1 (64 bit) Thunderbird 60.0.2 "My brain is like lightning, a quick flash and it's gone!" |
#63
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Windows folder excessively large
Ken Springer wrote:
Still on the trail of the space hog on this computer. We were able to connect via Teamviewer last night. Using TreeSize, I was able to track down the biggest space hog. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ik8d15rkm...3jXpRti0a?dl=0 AppDataLocalPackages contains over 60GB of data. Surely, something has gone wrong. The package that has the 60GB pf data that seems related to Microsoft Edge. Info I've found on removing the packages folder seems to be all over the place. Maybe I missed it but did you ever run the cleanup manager (cleanmgr.exe) and making sure to pick "system" for where it looks, as previously suggested? "typical clean up programs" doesn't really say what you used. Since that folder stores the user configuration for all the Modern UI apps, have you yet tried clearing the Windows Store cache by running wsreset? https://www.intowindows.com/how-to-c...in-windows-10/ If you have uninstalled or never installed any Modern UI apps and used Powershell to get rid of the bundled Modern UI apps then you can delete that folder. If there are no Modern UI apps in your setup, you don't need that folder. I don't where is the quarantine folder for anti-viruses ran on Windows 10. Some users reported recouping 30GB of disk space by uninstalling their AV software, doing remnant file and registry cleanup, and doing a fresh install of the AV software. Of course, perhaps you should first look in the AV's quarantine list to see what it might list in there. Could be you turned on logging in the AV, so there could be a ton of log files under that folder in a subfolder for the AV. There are several reports of AVG's AV or AVG's Web TuneUP where users saw many gigs of space consumed under that folder. Note: Avast owns AVG, so if you're using AVG now then you could uninstall, do remnant cleanup, and install Avast AV instead. Since the biggest offender under that folder is for Edge, have you gone into Edge and configured it to purge all its local data on exit, exit Edge, reload Edge, exit again, and check the disk space? Besides cookies and locally cached web pages, the user mighted visited many places that use DOM Storage which can store tons of user-data for a site on the local computer. https://www.onmsft.com/news/how-to-a...owsing-history I would suggest selecting everything to purge on exit except passwords. Alternatively, if nothing wants to be saved, not even passwords or program configuration, then just delete that Edge subfolder under Packages. I don't know how effective is CCleaner when ran on Windows 10; however, for fixes in CCleaner regarding Windows 10, you have to get a later version than 5.40 but that means getting Avast's tracking cookie regenerated everytime you run CCleaner along with Avast's adware platform added to CCleaner (Avast acquired Piriform). |
#64
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Windows folder excessively large
Ken Springer wrote:
On 8/27/18 7:08 AM, Ken Springer wrote: I've got a friend with Windows 10 on a recent Dell laptop. He's currently on the road, so as of this writing, I can't get you the latest and greatest info about the system. I do know the latest W10 update is not installed due to insufficient space. His Windows folder is just over 70GB in size! And his hard drive is just 120GB, an SSD. The drive in my computer is just over 20GB. Ran some of the typical clean up programs, found nothing. Virus scan, SuperAntiSpyware, Adware Cleaner, and Malwarebytes. Not a single issue found. Hard Drive Sentinel found 0 problems with the drive. IIRC, I even turned on hidden files and folders, found nothing. I'm looking for ideas as to how to discover what is using up the space, or at least telling W10 the space is in use. I considered just resetting the system, but we have to find a product key or two, as well as make sure he knows his Windows sign in information. Still on the trail of the space hog on this computer. We were able to connect via Teamviewer last night. Using TreeSize, I was able to track down the biggest space hog. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ik8d15rkm...3jXpRti0a?dl=0 AppDataLocalPackages contains over 60GB of data. Surely, something has gone wrong. The package that has the 60GB pf data that seems related to Microsoft Edge. Info I've found on removing the packages folder seems to be all over the place. Agreed. I can't find any instructions that give a sense of confidence. A good browser should be able to rebuild a data storage structure like that if it's deleted. And if it's been recording search strings and the like, it probably has duplicate copies of that stuff staged somewhere else. And the procedure at the bottom of this page, seems to have saved a bunch of stuff. It's hiding it's dribble somewhere :-) ******* You've probably seen discussions like this: "Well to reset Edge I have found deleting C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Packages\Microso ft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe Clears it, including favourites and all. That does break Edge for the user. To get it running again from an admin PowerShell prompt; Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers -Name Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml" -Verbose} " Which tells you that deleting everything in there doesn't work out so well. ******* You can work on it from the Settings gear wheel. https://i.postimg.cc/0NkX7ST3/msedge_ceremony_part1.gif https://i.postimg.cc/WpFWmTy2/msedge_ceremony_part2.gif I promise it'll be smaller after a RESET :-) When MSEdge next starts, it will look like this :-) https://i.postimg.cc/WbDvJBGr/bull****ter.gif Paul |
#65
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Windows folder excessively large
On 9/20/18 8:27 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
Ken Springer wrote: Still on the trail of the space hog on this computer. We were able to connect via Teamviewer last night. Using TreeSize, I was able to track down the biggest space hog. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ik8d15rkm...3jXpRti0a?dl=0 AppDataLocalPackages contains over 60GB of data. Surely, something has gone wrong. The package that has the 60GB pf data that seems related to Microsoft Edge. Info I've found on removing the packages folder seems to be all over the place. Maybe I missed it but did you ever run the cleanup manager (cleanmgr.exe) and making sure to pick "system" for where it looks, as previously suggested? "typical clean up programs" doesn't really say what you used. Not from the command line, but I did use the GUI Disk Cleanup and elected to clean up the system files. Since that folder stores the user configuration for all the Modern UI apps, have you yet tried clearing the Windows Store cache by running wsreset? If he's never done anything with the Windows Store, could it still be an issue? https://www.intowindows.com/how-to-c...in-windows-10/ If you have uninstalled or never installed any Modern UI apps and used Powershell to get rid of the bundled Modern UI apps then you can delete that folder. If there are no Modern UI apps in your setup, you don't need that folder. I've never done this, I avoid W10 except when someone wants help. LOL! And my friend wouldn't even know where to begin to do something like this. I don't where is the quarantine folder for anti-viruses ran on Windows 10. Some users reported recouping 30GB of disk space by uninstalling their AV software, doing remnant file and registry cleanup, and doing a fresh install of the AV software. Of course, perhaps you should first look in the AV's quarantine list to see what it might list in there. Could be you turned on logging in the AV, so there could be a ton of log files under that folder in a subfolder for the AV. There are several reports of AVG's AV or AVG's Web TuneUP where users saw many gigs of space consumed under that folder. Note: Avast owns AVG, so if you're using AVG now then you could uninstall, do remnant cleanup, and install Avast AV instead. Avast is installed, and it was done long ago. I didn't know Avast bought AVG. Since the biggest offender under that folder is for Edge, have you gone into Edge and configured it to purge all its local data on exit, exit Edge, reload Edge, exit again, and check the disk space? Besides cookies and locally cached web pages, the user mighted visited many places that use DOM Storage which can store tons of user-data for a site on the local computer. https://www.onmsft.com/news/how-to-a...owsing-history I just found a similar website yesterday, experimented on mine, but since I don't use Edge, hard to tell if it made any difference. I would suggest selecting everything to purge on exit except passwords. Alternatively, if nothing wants to be saved, not even passwords or program configuration, then just delete that Edge subfolder under Packages. I don't know how effective is CCleaner when ran on Windows 10; however, for fixes in CCleaner regarding Windows 10, you have to get a later version than 5.40 but that means getting Avast's tracking cookie regenerated everytime you run CCleaner along with Avast's adware platform added to CCleaner (Avast acquired Piriform). Ran the latest Ccleaner when first starting on this issue. I knew someone purchased Piriform, but didn't know it was Avast. -- Ken Mac OS X 10.11.6 Firefox 59.0.1 (64 bit) Thunderbird 60.0.2 "My brain is like lightning, a quick flash and it's gone!" |
#66
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Windows folder excessively large
On 9/20/18 10:50 PM, Paul wrote:
Ken Springer wrote: On 8/27/18 7:08 AM, Ken Springer wrote: I've got a friend with Windows 10 on a recent Dell laptop. He's currently on the road, so as of this writing, I can't get you the latest and greatest info about the system. I do know the latest W10 update is not installed due to insufficient space. His Windows folder is just over 70GB in size! And his hard drive is just 120GB, an SSD. The drive in my computer is just over 20GB. Ran some of the typical clean up programs, found nothing. Virus scan, SuperAntiSpyware, Adware Cleaner, and Malwarebytes. Not a single issue found. Hard Drive Sentinel found 0 problems with the drive. IIRC, I even turned on hidden files and folders, found nothing. I'm looking for ideas as to how to discover what is using up the space, or at least telling W10 the space is in use. I considered just resetting the system, but we have to find a product key or two, as well as make sure he knows his Windows sign in information. Still on the trail of the space hog on this computer. We were able to connect via Teamviewer last night. Using TreeSize, I was able to track down the biggest space hog. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ik8d15rkm...3jXpRti0a?dl=0 AppDataLocalPackages contains over 60GB of data. Surely, something has gone wrong. The package that has the 60GB pf data that seems related to Microsoft Edge. Info I've found on removing the packages folder seems to be all over the place. Agreed. I can't find any instructions that give a sense of confidence. A good browser should be able to rebuild a data storage structure like that if it's deleted. And if it's been recording search strings and the like, it probably has duplicate copies of that stuff staged somewhere else. And the procedure at the bottom of this page, seems to have saved a bunch of stuff. It's hiding it's dribble somewhere :-) ******* You've probably seen discussions like this: "Well to reset Edge I have found deleting C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Packages\Microso ft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe Clears it, including favourites and all. That does break Edge for the user. To get it running again from an admin PowerShell prompt; Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers -Name Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml" -Verbose} " Which tells you that deleting everything in there doesn't work out so well. ******* You can work on it from the Settings gear wheel. https://i.postimg.cc/0NkX7ST3/msedge_ceremony_part1.gif https://i.postimg.cc/WpFWmTy2/msedge_ceremony_part2.gif I promise it'll be smaller after a RESET :-) When MSEdge next starts, it will look like this :-) https://i.postimg.cc/WbDvJBGr/bull****ter.gif Thanks, Paul, very much. I'll let him know I've a possible solution, and see when we can get together. It says it saves Favorites, but I think I'll play it safe and export them first. -- Ken Mac OS X 10.11.6 Firefox 59.0.1 (64 bit) Thunderbird 60.0.2 "My brain is like lightning, a quick flash and it's gone!" |
#67
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Windows folder excessively large
On 9/20/18 10:50 PM, Paul wrote:
Ken Springer wrote: On 8/27/18 7:08 AM, Ken Springer wrote: I've got a friend with Windows 10 on a recent Dell laptop. He's currently on the road, so as of this writing, I can't get you the latest and greatest info about the system. I do know the latest W10 update is not installed due to insufficient space. His Windows folder is just over 70GB in size! And his hard drive is just 120GB, an SSD. The drive in my computer is just over 20GB. Ran some of the typical clean up programs, found nothing. Virus scan, SuperAntiSpyware, Adware Cleaner, and Malwarebytes. Not a single issue found. Hard Drive Sentinel found 0 problems with the drive. IIRC, I even turned on hidden files and folders, found nothing. I'm looking for ideas as to how to discover what is using up the space, or at least telling W10 the space is in use. I considered just resetting the system, but we have to find a product key or two, as well as make sure he knows his Windows sign in information. Still on the trail of the space hog on this computer. We were able to connect via Teamviewer last night. Using TreeSize, I was able to track down the biggest space hog. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ik8d15rkm...3jXpRti0a?dl=0 AppDataLocalPackages contains over 60GB of data. Surely, something has gone wrong. The package that has the 60GB pf data that seems related to Microsoft Edge. Info I've found on removing the packages folder seems to be all over the place. Agreed. I can't find any instructions that give a sense of confidence. A good browser should be able to rebuild a data storage structure like that if it's deleted. And if it's been recording search strings and the like, it probably has duplicate copies of that stuff staged somewhere else. And the procedure at the bottom of this page, seems to have saved a bunch of stuff. It's hiding it's dribble somewhere :-) ******* You've probably seen discussions like this: "Well to reset Edge I have found deleting C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Packages\Microso ft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe Clears it, including favourites and all. That does break Edge for the user. To get it running again from an admin PowerShell prompt; Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers -Name Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml" -Verbose} " Which tells you that deleting everything in there doesn't work out so well. ******* You can work on it from the Settings gear wheel. https://i.postimg.cc/0NkX7ST3/msedge_ceremony_part1.gif https://i.postimg.cc/WpFWmTy2/msedge_ceremony_part2.gif I promise it'll be smaller after a RESET :-) When MSEdge next starts, it will look like this :-) https://i.postimg.cc/WbDvJBGr/bull****ter.gif Paul Well, I certainly don't want to break it, -- Ken Mac OS X 10.11.6 Firefox 59.0.1 (64 bit) Thunderbird 60.0.2 "My brain is like lightning, a quick flash and it's gone!" |
#68
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Windows folder excessively large
On 9/20/18 10:50 PM, Paul wrote:
Ken Springer wrote: On 8/27/18 7:08 AM, Ken Springer wrote: I've got a friend with Windows 10 on a recent Dell laptop. He's currently on the road, so as of this writing, I can't get you the latest and greatest info about the system. I do know the latest W10 update is not installed due to insufficient space. His Windows folder is just over 70GB in size! And his hard drive is just 120GB, an SSD. The drive in my computer is just over 20GB. Ran some of the typical clean up programs, found nothing. Virus scan, SuperAntiSpyware, Adware Cleaner, and Malwarebytes. Not a single issue found. Hard Drive Sentinel found 0 problems with the drive. IIRC, I even turned on hidden files and folders, found nothing. I'm looking for ideas as to how to discover what is using up the space, or at least telling W10 the space is in use. I considered just resetting the system, but we have to find a product key or two, as well as make sure he knows his Windows sign in information. Still on the trail of the space hog on this computer. We were able to connect via Teamviewer last night. Using TreeSize, I was able to track down the biggest space hog. https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ik8d15rkm...3jXpRti0a?dl=0 AppDataLocalPackages contains over 60GB of data. Surely, something has gone wrong. The package that has the 60GB pf data that seems related to Microsoft Edge. Info I've found on removing the packages folder seems to be all over the place. Agreed. I can't find any instructions that give a sense of confidence. A good browser should be able to rebuild a data storage structure like that if it's deleted. And if it's been recording search strings and the like, it probably has duplicate copies of that stuff staged somewhere else. And the procedure at the bottom of this page, seems to have saved a bunch of stuff. It's hiding it's dribble somewhere :-) ******* You've probably seen discussions like this: "Well to reset Edge I have found deleting C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Packages\Microso ft.MicrosoftEdge_8wekyb3d8bbwe Clears it, including favourites and all. That does break Edge for the user. To get it running again from an admin PowerShell prompt; Get-AppXPackage -AllUsers -Name Microsoft.MicrosoftEdge | Foreach {Add-AppxPackage -DisableDevelopmentMode -Register "$($_.InstallLocation)\AppXManifest.xml" -Verbose} " Which tells you that deleting everything in there doesn't work out so well. ******* You can work on it from the Settings gear wheel. https://i.postimg.cc/0NkX7ST3/msedge_ceremony_part1.gif https://i.postimg.cc/WpFWmTy2/msedge_ceremony_part2.gif I promise it'll be smaller after a RESET :-) When MSEdge next starts, it will look like this :-) https://i.postimg.cc/WbDvJBGr/bull****ter.gif Well, Paul, I don't know if this worked or not, because I failed to check on space when I should have. I didn't check the free space before I unlinked OneDrive from his account. So, I'm sitting here kicking myself for that. But, something worked. Before the reset, there was 2.74 GB of free space. Now, 60 GB of free space, and W10 is happily downloading the latest W10 update! :-) -- Ken Mac OS X 10.11.6 Firefox 59.0.1 (64 bit) Thunderbird 60.0.2 "My brain is like lightning, a quick flash and it's gone!" |
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