dell pc tune up

ok i will sort of give my story right now.  I just installed  syantec virus software from my school like two days ago.  I think that has been going on longer though.  The situation i have now confirmed is as:

Whenever i open the properties for my main c hard drive it is showing only around 3 gb free space.  my hard drive is 144 gb and only has like 3 8 gb virtual machines with nothign on them really and then my main operating sytem.  So about 20 gb for my main  operating sytem and then 8gb allocated for each vm are the only hard drive space that should be taken up.  The strange thing about whenever i open the properties of my hard drive to check its free space i get randmon numbers ranging from 488 mb to around 6 gb.  This is each and every time i open it.  It is really wierd and i think i need a hard drive fix.

The easiest way is to run diskcleanup. If you have Vista, click your start button and then type diskcleanup in your run start command line at the bottom of the  start column. It is pretty self explanatory after that.

The disk deframenter on my computer is not working.  It will say it is defragmenting disks but will not defragment for over 12 hours of waiting while it says it is.

I think this is directly related to the problem if i can somehow get disk deframenter to work i am sure my free space will go back to normal.

kaekruse; wlcome to DCF

*** do not reinstall yet.

Do a disk cleanup, once it gathers data to delete, review them and select all that you want delete.

Before you hit OK here, go to the second tab and click delete restore points and confirm.

Vista especially and to a small extent XP keep your restore points/files and after a while you have a bunch of them that take up your disk space.

Once you click OK and disk cleanup finishes, you will see a lot more free disk space.

As to your problem not being able to defragment, it is bexause you probably are using over 80% of your disk space.  Windows Dfragmenter needs available space to move files around so that it can defrag your disk.

Once you have done disk cleanup, you should be able to perform defrag.

I always try to keep at least 20-25% of my HDD empty for better performance.

Once you get to a point that you need the extra space, you should look into adding more hard disk space.  Depending on your machine, you could add internal or external drives.  I have a WD External 500Gig for all my backups.  I bought it over a year ago for 169, I think you could now get that for half what I paid for, or you could get a 1TB External drive for the same price.

Good Luck.

Peace

i think i have up to 20 gb free space now that helps what you told me.  However i know for sure i only have aroudn 20 gb used space so i still need to do stuff.

I did this but there is somethign realy wrong with my computer.  When i try to open up computer to look at my hard drive space the window will not respond and the disk space is still all taken up.  I think it is a real virus or real problem in my hard drive.  Is there like a special hard drive thing that will check every possible problem?

---

@kaekruse wrote:

...  I think it is a real virus or real problem in my hard drive.  Is there like a special hard drive thing that will check every possible problem?

---