Computers & Tablets

[LyndseyS]

Up until yesterday, my laptop has been running great. I have a Gateway T3200 and yesterday it was saying that I had 173GB free of the 217GB  storage. I haven't done anything except uninstall a couple of programs that I had downloaded earlier. Last night before I shut it off it said I had 169GB left of storage, and now this morning when I turned it on it said I had 168GB when I haven't done anything. This morning it took forever to load just my pictures and I have maybe 15 pics on here.. There really isn't anything on here thats different from when I first got it 2months ago. So can someone please help me as to why its doing this?

 xx

-Lyndsey

[u_hsen]

just by browsing websites, watching videos online, they download the content into your computer. like surfing youtube or website with lots of images. that will take up your hard drive space as well.

Open up Internet Explorer

go to the upper right hand corner and click on Tools.

click on "Internet Options"

under browsing history, click on the button says "delete."

and just click "delete all" it'll get rid of all the "junk" in your system.

[samiam2]

browsers are a great hog (especially when you look at the default settings

I would also suggest defraging the hard drive.  It's not going to increase your storage but it will speed up hard drive access.  

Also "it took forever to load just my pictures"    slideshow?    how big are the images?   I've seen people not aware that the images were 10MB each.  So you are loading 150MB into RAM...just for the pictures never mind the slideshow. 

Not sure what OS.     basically do a right click on the drive letter you want to defrag  (it should be under properties (click on that) "tools" tab).  

[Sassums]

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@u_hsen wrote:

just by browsing websites, watching videos online, they download the content into your computer. like surfing youtube or website with lots of images. that will take up your hard drive space as well.

Open up Internet Explorer

go to the upper right hand corner and click on Tools.

click on "Internet Options"

under browsing history, click on the button says "delete."

and just click "delete all" it'll get rid of all the "junk" in your system.

---

I wasn't aware they could take up that much memory?

[u_hsen]

yup! when u watch a video from a website, youtube, stuff like that, they download the whole video into your computer, after build up u can be looking at over 1gb of storage

[DCI105]

It is also possible that you have possibly picked up a downloader virus. They get in your system and begin download random programs. This will cause your system to slow down, and take a while to load items into your memory. Run your antivirus and antispyware protection to ensure you aren't infected. If you have programs that begin popping up at startup then I would say your are most likely infected.

You also want to go ahead and delete your temporary internet files, and clear your caches. This will free up space on your system, and dump the videos that you have watched.