I have had a problem with a very slow computer lately, and when I checked the hard disk I had only 1 Gb of space left. This is very surprising, as I have a 100Gb disk and not THAT much junk.
After some looking around I discover that Norton uses 28Gb for virusdef files!
Is this really necessary? Are there any other products out there that can get by on less hard drive space? I don't want to buy another hard drive just to store Norton virus definition files!
I have had a problem with a very slow computer lately, and when I checked the hard disk I had only 1 Gb of space left. This is very surprising, as I have a 100Gb disk and not THAT much junk.
After some looking around I discover that Norton uses 28Gb for virusdef files!
Is this really necessary? Are there any other products out there that can get by on less hard drive space? I don't want to buy another hard drive just to store Norton virus definition files!
Hi Rodnebb,
Welcome to the forum. This does not sound right. I just checked my path where the Virus def files are located and it is using only 253 MB.
Please specify exactly how you are checking this.
Also if your subscription is current you are entitled to a free update to NIS 2010. You can get NIS 2010 from the Update Center.
Allen
I used a program called WinDirStat to map my disk usage.
Here I find a directory underneath My Document and Settings .... Norton etc with 28Gb
These Gb's seem to be mostly old temp files not deleted. For some reason Norton does not remove these old files!
Hi Rodnebb,
Can you give me the full path along with a few filenames? I'm not finding this kind of thing on my computer. My entire Documents and Settings directory tree contains only 409MB of data. I can tell you that NIS stores Virus def files in the C: Program Data path, not in My Documents and Settings. There may be some tmp files somewhere else but you should be able to safely remove those.
What OS do you have? And I would suggest also updating to NIS 2010 as I mentioned in my last post.
Thanks
Allen
Sorry, I have deinstalled Norton by now, and I can't remember the exact path. The 28Gb were located with the virus defs, and it may well be in Program Data. One of the directories were called something like vdefs.
When I deinstalled Norton I also gained 32Gb of memory, so I am quite certain that Norton was using this much disk space.
Removing these temporary files manually was out of the question - we are talking about a lot of files, and they were not at all just called .tmp. I guess that they are temp files used during virus scanning and not deleted afterwards. There were old files here which seemed to contain logs of past scans (back to january or so when I installed Norton).
And my OS is XP.
After I deinstalled Norton my computer became "brand new" again, and works beautifully!
Hi Rodnebb,
Thanks for the update. This is not typical at all. Something may have become corrupted with your NIS installation and I am sure that can be solved.
Would you like to work on this?
Also, my suggestion to update to NIS 2010 still stands and is a free update as long as your NIS subscription is current.
If you install NIS 2010 we can see over time if this problem returns.
Allen
But I’m not very keen on having to reinstall Norton every 6 months! And why should Norton 2010 be better in this respect?
rodnebb wrote:
But I'm not very keen on having to reinstall Norton every 6 months! And why should Norton 2010 be better in this respect?
HI Rodnebb,
What I am trying to say is that this is not typical for NIS to take up GB's of space for virus defs and such. This could indicate that something became corrupted in the installation. This could have even already been resolved by you simply uninstalling NIS.
I suggested NIS 2010 because it is an improved version with a lighter footprint than 2009, not because of this issue. Whether NIS 2009 or 2010, the problem you had is simply not typical.
My Program Data path (where defs are stored) + the normal Program Files directory tree together is only about 320MB or so.
Of course it is up to you but I hope that you are not planning to not have any AV program installed on your computer.
Thanks
Allen
Rod,
I'm intrigued by your experience since I've not run into this or anything like it.
I don't suppose you used the DiskClean function that is on the General TAB when you right mouse click on the drive icon in My Computer? I find that an effective way of cleaning out my drive at intervals since it first lists what it thinks could be OK to delete and allows you to check or uncheck. However I don't know if it does deal with Norton files.
Could you Right Mouse Click on the Recycle Bin icon on your desktop and select Properties and say what percentage of the hard drive is shown as reserved for the recycle bin?
I think Windows is default coded to some ridiculously high percentage -- 10%? -- and this is stupid on modern hard drives that run into Gigabytes (My first Toshiba Laptop had a 10MB hard drive and my first Thinkpad had a 340MB drive and it had two OS's installed on it -- Windows 3.1 and OS/2!)
I have mine set to 4% now and that is more than enough. Since your currrent hard drive is not that large by modern standards you may want to alter that setting yourself -- it applies to all drives if you have more than one.
I hope you will give NIS another try using 2010 since it is really good; one of the best available.
Ok, thanks for the advice.
When I come to think about it, I may have had similar problems with other programs on this computer. (files not being cleaned up).
For instance, if I try to delete a directory, it often fails. (only a few files are removed, then an error occurs. Repeating the delete command enough times will typically delete everything, but when deleting several Gb this is a process that can take a long time). Emptying the recycle bin also fails (same error as when deleting a directory - I've resorted to turning the recycle bin off), and I had to go over and delete large amounts of what appeared to be leftover windows update files. I did reinstall my computer after noting these problems, but they did not disappear. Consequently, it may be that it is the fact that Norton is very active (scans the computer and creates temporary files to support this) that causes Norton to get a problem with this. However - the Norton deinstall worked well, and freed up the disk space.
I didnt see huwyngr's post.
As I said I have deactivated Recycle Bin since I can't empty it, so it should use a very small proportion of my disk space.
I have tried using the Disk Cleanup function, but this does not work well - it didn't remove any of the Norton files (it registers at best only a few hundred mb of deleteable data when I ran it) and it even doesn't manage to properly remove the files it says it shall remove (re-running it after a cleanup it still finds plenty of files to remove).
It does sound as if you have something pretty fundemental that is not working as it should.
Maybe someone can help debug that!
You said you have XP installed -- what Service Packs are installed? How much RAM? Any other information about the PC would be useful.
Do you have any other software utilities installed that might have some effect?
Have you thought of uninstalling WinDirStat to see if it has any effect. I had a look at their website and it goes back a ways without any updates it would seem. The Google on it gave me the impression that it in itself might slow down a PC and the CNET download page talked about it taking 5 - 10 minutes to do its survey and presentation of information.
Recently I've been using CCleaner to clean up and look for problems. It might be worth trying?
Hi Rod,
Yes, please post as much detail about this as you can. What you described is definitely not normal and we should get this resolved for you.
This sounds like something completely unrelated to NIS, almost like some permissions issue or something.
The next time you try deleting or doing clean-up and it fails can you try logging on with a different user account and see if that works? I want to verify if this is something related to a specific user account or something more generic in nature.
Thanks much
Allen
I have 2Gb RAM and using XP SP3 with windows update turned on.
I don't think the WinDirStat is responsible, it uses resources but only when it's being run.
I have admin privileges on my account.
Please try the following to see if this will help in the deleting of files:
Create a new Administrator level account of your XP machine and boot into this user's profile (this will force XP to make a new profile in the Registry). Then try to delete temporary files (clean up files) will in this profile. If this is successful then you should see if you can move to this profile; your normal user profile seems to be corrupt in some respects.
Thanks Rod,
I doubt Windirstat is responsible but take it as a fundermental of troubleshooting to eliminate variables as much as possible!
You are in good hands here so I'll leave you with them and just follow progress .....
Hi Rod,
We'll get you through this. Dbrisendine and I both are of the belief that something could be wrong with your user profile which could be causing this. There are two things you can do to help test this theory:
1) Log on to a different already existing user account with Admin rights and see if the problem still exists.
2) Create a new user with full Admin rights and log on with that user and retest.
Between the two of these steps it should confirm if this is user account related or not.
Thanks
Allen
Hi, it took some time to test, but I have tried 2), by trying to delete a folder tree on C drive. This didn’t work even with a new admin account.