1028 Hard Disk Horror

Saturday, December 23, 2006

I've been uploading photos from my hard disk to Flickr.com, and yesterday I decided to look for other photos that maybe didn't make it into my "Photos" folder. So I did a "Find" for "*.jpg". The results were shocking. There were pictures out there from practically every product, every website, every banner ad, every online dating guy's profile, everything I'd looked at for literally years!

I do a disk cleanup every few days, and it says it's cleaning up temporary internet files, but that doesn't include a LOT of other temporary internet stuff out there. Like the cache. There was six-year-old stuff in the caches, probably left when the browsers bounce (one to five times a day these days).

About twice or more a week I have to push the "off/on" button because the system hangs, and every time I do that, Windows leaves temp stuff, and it never cleans it up! Would that be so difficult? If Windows expects me to recognize what should be deleted, then Windows ought to be able to identify it. Sheesh.

I also discovered that every time I download a photo from an email into my "photos" file, AOL plants another copy of the same picture in any one of at least three other places.

It's no wonder my hard disk is so cluttered I can't defragment it any more.

I have a copy of "Windows 98 for Dummies", but under "temporary files" and how to identify them and how to get rid of them, it says almost nothing.

Anybody have any ideas as to what I should do? (This is Windows 98 SE. What's "Explorer"?) I won't be ready to buy another system for another few months. I'd really like to clean this one up.

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Complicating factors - The hard disk is partitioned. I believe there's a total of at least 9G available (Jay hand-built much of this beast, 11 years ago). There's a 2G C-Disk containing all the system and application software. There's a 2G D-Disk containing data files, like photos, music, some documents, etc. That leaves 5G more, which I believe are a E-Disk and F-Disk, but they are hidden! You can't get the system to admit they exist under any query. Jay created them to hold proprietary information that he was working on for The Company and for the clients of a partnership he was working with. I know there's a lot of sensitive (well, sensitive six years ago) information out there, and I'd love to kill it all and get that disk space back, but I can't. Worse, this disk arrangement makes it almost impossible to build any kind of rescue disk.

It's scary.
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