Quote:
Originally Posted by racerx520
thats what i was thinking too, i couldnt possibly imagine xp taking up all that room. and yes the recycling bin has been emptied several times over. it seems like every 2 weeks i have to find one or two more non-essential programs to delete, next onthe list will have to be microsoft office if it comes down to it cuz java and crap are still on there for the web.
would it matter at all if the computer was reformatted? cuz i think it was like 2 or 3 times and i was told that old information stays imbedded on the hard drive even though its says its been deleted. if that is true that could it possibly be fromthat? i know a bit about computers but no where near enough to deal with this problem lol and we dont quite have the money to spend to take it to a shop to speed it up
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Long winded answer:
When you delete a file, it does not scrub it from the disk. It just breaks the "file pointer", which is metadata that tells the computer where/what the data is. Breaking the pointer marks the sector on the disk as "free space" and when you use that space again (fill it with new data) the bits of data are overwritten and your original file is gone. (Side note: this is how disks get "fragmented"- when the new data is too big for the first available spot on the disk it gets scattered about to different sectors, making the arm move around a lot, increasing seek time and making the computer "slower". When you defrag, it makes all of the files exist in one block of space each, so the arm doesn't have to search as much).
So, if you were to delete a ton of data at once, then shut down, pull your hard drive, and take it for recovery, they could get your data back- because the 1's and 0's are still there. You just can't get to them through conventional means.
Try this before buying anything:
http://windirstat.info/
It will tell you what your biggest files are and where they reside.