What To Do If the WINNT/WINDOWS Folder of Your Computer Takes More Than 10 GB

Recently I faced this problem in my personal computer. Earlier we used to use smaller hard disks as per the disk space concern than what we are using now-a-days. This problem of not having much space in hard disk is more critical if you use a disk of lesser space. I had a 40 GB hard disk within which one particular folder was taking more than half of total disk space. This may happen due to several reasons. One very common problem we often found is disk index problem. Though the disk is availing that much space, due to indexing problem of operating system sometimes we may see that disk is almost full. In this case operating system fails to index the disk properly and showing a wrong space availability of the disk. The space which has indexing problem can not be used for further use until you fix the index problem. You can fix the disk index problem by using several softwares which are easily available in market. One of such available software is Disk Index 1.4.

The space problem what I faced was for WINNT folder. This may happen in any system folder like WINNT or WINDOWS. Generally if you have any Network Server Operating System installed, it creates WINNT folder. Suppose if you have Windows NT or Windows 2000 Server you will find WINNT folder under C drive. For all other cases such as Windows XP etc you will find WINDOWS folder in C drive. The typical size of this WINNT or WINDOWS folder will be 2 GB to 3 GB at maximum.

How do you understand that this folder has some problem? Place your cursor on this folder and see what the size of this folder is. Now, go inside of this folder and select all folders pressing Ctrl+A. While selected press right button key of the mouse to open the properties of these selected folders. From the properties dialog box you can see total size of all these folders. If you have a mismatch between these two sizes as measured then you have to understand this folder has some problem. This is not always that these two sizes will be equal. There must be little difference between these two measured sizes, but the difference won't be that significant. There are few system folder and hidden folders which don't display in usual folder viewing mode. In order to see those folders you have to uncheck the box for 'Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)' under folder option. You can follow this path to enable this special view - Tools -> Folder Options -> View.

Within this WINNT folder we have to look for one folder called 'Installer'. Operating system keeps its installation files here. Sometimes these files take lot of spaces. For my case these files took more than 9 GB of space. Most of the installation files you don't require anymore. We need to look for .msp files. The .MSP files stores the patch installation files for Windows operating system. Now-a-days we found .MSI files also which uses standard Windows MSI installer mechanism. We can delete these .msp files and this won't cause any problem for your computer. This way you can rectify this problem of showing larger space of your computer..