Problem with my laptop and memory

[Ultratank]

Alright so yeah i've downloaded stuff off the internet before who here hasn't? This incident however didn't require any downloads. I had noticed that MB and even some GBs from my computer were missing and it ended up being less and less space on my computer as the days passed. I'm not downloading anything either. i sometimes delete stuff just so i'll have enough space to brose the internet.

Sometimes I will just have it sitting there not oding nothing and i'll still lose space. On youtube? still lose space. any other website? still loseing space on my laptop. I had ran this year's Norton wihich updates every so often and nothing is wrong. Sure i find viruses and I delete them all though. So what is the deal here any help please?

 

[star-warrior]

Could it be that your browser is storing up temporary internet files that it is taking up so much space? I'd clear your browser cache and see if this helps first.

 

[T-Rexx]

This is called a "memory leak".

They're pretty common in Windows.

Here are Microsoft's recommendations about what to do about it: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms859415.aspx

 

[Ultratank]

This is called a "memory leak".

They're pretty common in Windows.

Here are Microsoft's recommendations about what to do about it: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms859415.aspx

I'm almost 100% sure this is what is happening but I don't really get what link says. I go to the black "cmd" screan and type in "mi." but says is is not recognized or something. I've tried using task manager after I was searching around about memory leakages on google to check and see what programs are taking up alot of space. It didn't really help either. Do you have any other idea for me to do?

 

[trinket]

Alright so yeah i've downloaded stuff off the internet before who here hasn't? This incident however didn't require any downloads. I had noticed that MB and even some GBs from my computer were missing and it ended up being less and less space on my computer as the days passed. I'm not downloading anything either. i sometimes delete stuff just so i'll have enough space to brose the internet.

Sometimes I will just have it sitting there not oding nothing and i'll still lose space. On youtube? still lose space. any other website? still loseing space on my laptop. I had ran this year's Norton wihich updates every so often and nothing is wrong. Sure i find viruses and I delete them all though. So what is the deal here any help please?

Hi Ultratank. It looks like you're talking about "hard drive space" (physical hard drive, and C:\ etc.) - not "memory" (system RAM) as you wrote. It's an important distinction because your terminology has caused possibly the wrong advice (a memory leak) to be given to you in this thread.

If you're sure it's hard drive space, you can download a tool like Windirstat for free. It's a graphical tool that'll scan your hard drive and show you where your space is going. You can even compare it to a previous scan several times a day or the next day, etc. to see what's eating up your space - for instance if your temporary Internet files folder (as mentioned earlier in this thread) is cacheing a lot of stuff. Or, if you have unfinished Internet Explorer files you might have partial files left over, or possibly system updates downloading that are pending and waiting to be installed.

If you don't have enough system RAM for all the programs you're executing, Windows will start writing to paging files on the hard drive as "virtual RAM" which may grow depending on your settings. You didn't mention your operating system (XP? Vista? Windows 7) or hardware specs which might help us diagnose further, so we can only give you general tips.

 

[Ultratank]

Thanks everyone! I ended up finding out there were 118GB of temporary internet files on my computer! Got rid of them too again thanks!

 

[star-warrior]

Thanks everyone! I ended up finding out there were 118GB of temporary internet files on my computer! Got rid of them too again thanks!

118 Gigabytes!!??

 

[trinket]

118 Gigabytes!!??

Yeah, that's a little bit extreme! Maybe he means 118 MB?

Mind you, I've seen Internet Explorer installations that stop observing the setting to keep X amount of space in temporary files and just keep growing and growing the temporary folder and subfolders. If you have download problems and a lot of temporary, uncompleted stuff stashed there or watch a lot of online video it could conceivably add up to that much with a few years of use and IE never cleaning up after itself, heh. Ultratank, keep an eye on your IE settings with regard to how much temporary space you allow it to occupy, and how much space is actually getting used, and maybe move to a new version which might fix this issue as part of the upgrade?