 | By Fred Langa Most Windows and PC troubles fit into patterns, but every once in a while a truly weird, never-before-seen problem crops up. In a novel and mysterious case, a reader’s hard drive suddenly fills up with hundreds of huge files. |
Useful tools clean clutter from hard drives
Reader John Willoughby titled his e-mail “A very unusual problem.” He wasn’t kidding.
- “My desktop PC, which has two 360GB drives, began to slow down a few days ago, so much so that it seemed like it was going to seize up. 300GBs of drive space had been swallowed up, and I have no idea how. A search showed that, in one day, hundreds of 1GB temp files had been set up. I deleted these and got most of the lost drive space back. I have no idea how or why those files were created. I’d appreciate any suggestions.”
My first thought is that you encountered some kind of crude malware designed to consume disk space until your system became unusable or crashed. I suggest you immediately run several different online scanners from various security-tool vendors to see what they can find.
Three sites to try are: McAfee’s Freescan, Trendmicro’s HouseCall, and Symantec’s Security Check.
If you know the date when the trouble started, you can also use a good search tool to look for any programs, DLLs, ActiveX, or any other kind of executable software added or created around that time — any software added just before the trouble struck is a prime suspect.
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