Wondering Where Your Space Went? Try WinDirStat

[Jason Dunn]

My Media Center machine beeped at me this morning and complained it was out of hard drive space on the C: drive - I store all my TV recordings, and indeed all my media, on other drives/partitions, so the C: drive is a mere 20GB - just enough for Windows and a few small programs. I was down to 400MB, which was baffling because I have basically nothing installed on this PC (I'm scared to death of destabilizing MCE 2005 again). I ran the excellent WinDirStat (http://windirstat.sourceforge.net/) program to ferret out which directories on my C: drive were taking up space, and I was surprised to discover that the SOINC DVD burning tool that integrates into MCE2005 wasn't deleting all the shows it had transcoded for burning. So I dug down into this path:

C:\Documents and Settings\ Jason Dunn\ Local Settings\ Temp\ Microsoft Windows MCE.Sonic\ AuthorScript.tmp\ Transcodes

I discovered 4.1 GB of MPEG files in that folder - four TV shows, I believe the last four that I had burned to DVD.<!> It could be that the SONIC tool keeps the last session around in case you want to burn another copy, but when the first DVD is finished burning it should prompt the user to keep the files or delete them. I ran WinDirStat again and found even more surprises in this folder:

C:\Documents and Settings\ Jason Dunn\ Local Settings\ Application Data\ Microsoft\ Media Player\ Transcoded Files Cache

2.28 GB of data in that folder - all of them .tmp files. Why I ask? I assume those are temporary files related to video transcoding that I had done for my Zen Vision:M, but that was back in January - why keep them for three months? This system has been rebooted this since (several times), so it's not like there's a cleanup process upon boot that's not happening. The Windows XP Disc Cleanup tool missed all of these.

I found a few more files - I had moved over some video files from another PC and put them in the Shared Documents folder - and after moving them out I'm sitting comfortably again at 13.6 GB of free storage space.

[OSUKid7]

Wow, I've had very similar issues. I've been getting that MCE error message on and off when trying to watch live TV the past few weeks. I didn't have anything much in my C:\Documents and Settings\ &lt;username>\ Local Settings\ Temp\ Microsoft Windows MCE.Sonic\ AuthorScript.tmp\ Transcodes directory, but oh did I have a lot in C:\Documents and Settings\ &lt;username>\ Local Settings\ Application Data\ Microsoft\ Media Player\ Transcoded Files Cache. I just got my Creative Zen Vision: M last week, and set up automatic syncrohnization, including the last week's worth of recorded TV. (That's an awesome feature, btw. :D) But oh boy... I have 3.77 GB of .tmp files in that directory.

By the way - I have a 35 GB partition for Windows XP and Program Files. Is there any reason to have separate Windows and Programs partitions? If you have to reinstall Windows, you'll have to reinstall programs anyway to get the registry back to normal. I'll probably be reformatting my laptop in a month or so, and am going to attempt to have four partitions on my 100 GB intrenal drive - Windows XP, Documents, Windows Vista, and Ubuntu Linux. I record TV to an external drive, but that'll still be a tight fit, given how much Windows requires to avoid problems like this.

[Jason Dunn]

Is there any reason to have separate Windows and Programs partitions? If you have to reinstall Windows, you'll have to reinstall programs anyway to get the registry back to normal.

Nope, it makes no sense to have your Windows and Programs separate. It does make sense to have your My Documents folder on another partition though.

[ctmagnus]

If you like pie graphs, there's Visual Directory Explorer (http://jkontherun.blogs.com/jkontherun/2006/04/freeware_of_the_1.html), which does the same thing with the addition of a pie graph. ;)