I was asked by a friend to look at their Dell computer which is running on a Windows 7 Pro, 64 bit platform. The problem was it had a 128GB drive which was all but full (a few KB left). It seemed the Windows folder was responsible for taking up all that space which I knew was abnormal since it occupies less than 40GB in my own computer.
I took it to a nearby Staples computer center since I didnt feel that comfortable doing anything myself and they ran their DoctorPC program which cleaned it up but the problem remained and they were completely stumped. I didnt want to do a clean install because it would wipe out the programs on the machine and I wasnt sure if my friend even had them anymore. Taking it home, I bought a new 500GB drive and cloned the old drive to it using a StarTech cloner. When I started it up, the machine still showed a 128GB hard drive nearly full. Updates wouldnt load and the machine was barely operational because anything tended to exceed the memory limits.
At that point I started consolidating &deleting files that were duplicated under several old users since my friend is the only user (the machine had a previous owner). That helped some, so I went into the Windows folder and found that the Windows Temp folder was huge. Taking a chance, I deleted the contents (leaving the folder intact).
That has appeared to fix the original problem and cleared up more than half the 128GB hard drive space. The machine appears to be running fine.
Now what I need help with is to get the computer to recognize the full 500GB of the new drive (still shows 128GB in system manager). It would be great if I could make all of this space available to my friend.
Did I error in deleting the Temp files?
Thanks.
Edited by Fortran7, 20 February 2018 - 10:18 PM.