Sunday, May 26, 2019

An Acer Mystery

     Yesterday, I got out my backup laptop, an old Acer running, for reasons not entirely clear to me, Windows 8.

     The hard drive, an 18 GB SSD, is nearly full.  I cannot figure why; the directories don't show anything bloating it up, and yet -- there's less than 2 Gig left.

     Not sure why.  It may be something very ugly, or just a mess left by CCleaner several years ago; it went through a brief spate of hauling along some ugly malware before re-emerging under new ownership as a slightly less effective (and a lot less well-behaved) tool than it had been.

    So I'm looking at other ways of seeing what's happening -- downloading and installing WinDirStat as I write this -- and we'll see what it's got to say.

    In the meantime, my sinuses are so messed up that I've lost vertical!  Either that, or this entire room is about 30 degree off level, which seems unlikely; also, you'd think that would show up in slant of coffee in my cup.

     Edited To Add: Well, that didn't help.  And why do I have a 10 GB recovery partition?

     Further Edited: Freed up three and a half Gig.  Stopping there.  The new power supply for my Surface showed up a couple of hours ago!

6 comments:

Ratus said...

"...why do I have a 10 Gb recovery partition?"

Because you suck and Microsoft hates you. :D

I'm still on 8.1, but it looks like windows 10 upgrade causes it.

Ratus said...

"...you'd think that would show up in slant of coffee in my cup."

Not if the tiny artificial gravity generator in the base was on. (Microwave Safe of course, that's how you recharge it.)

FrankC said...

Is it possible that the recovery partition contains images of earlier versions of itself?

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

Acer probably put the 10GB recovery partition in at the factory. You can delete it if you don’t expect to have to recover your OS.

Frankly, I’d recommend upgrading to Win 10 if it’s at 8. 8 is nasty. IMHO.

Also, try running the native Windows Disk Cleanup.

Roberta X said...

The native Windows cleanup was s-l-o-w but got it. Win 10, maybe -- if I can find the darned Product Key.

c-90 said...

Win 10 can still be upgraded to free with the win 8 registration key: https://www.howtogeek.com/272201/all-the-ways-you-can-still-get-windows-10-for-free/
OR you could get a Linux distro for your laptop burned on a cd and try it and search thru your c:\ disk for crud. There's also a site (I can't find the url) that sells complete recovery cd sets for most computers, you enter the maker and model and then order the set, fif they don't list it, you can order the set special.