Until a few weeks ago my computer had about 45% free space, as indicated by the Disk Defragmenter utility. However, the disk has suddenly become full. We haven’t downloaded any large files except Windows XP Service Pack 2, which was 250MB. Looking in ‘Add/Remove Programs’ shows only two large items, which were games occupying about 1 GB each. Something which may have caused the problem was my son loaded a security program from a magazine cover CD. When this program was loaded the antivirus software on the computer would be stuck on scanning this program. Since deleting the security software the antivirus scan sticks at the ‘Disc Cleanup’ stage. How can I solve the antivirus problem, and the issue of my hard drive filling with data? The computer is running Windows XP with a 20 GB hard drive.

Firstly, we will deal with your problem of the hard drive filling with data over a relatively short period of time. To start with we should check that for some reason Disk Defragmenter is not giving a false indication of the amount of free space. Go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘My Computer’ and right-click on your hard drive then select ‘Properties’. Click the ‘General’ tab and look at the information on your hard drive to see the amount of free space. Assuming your drive is relatively full, we can’t do much until we know where all these space consuming files are located. Chances are, they are probably all going to be located in one place (e.g. one particular program directory). A while ago I mentioned to another reader a program called FoldersReport (www.nirsoft.net/utils/folrep.html). This handy utility will give you a report of all folders (and subfolders) on your computer, displaying the size of the folder (i.e. accumulative size of all files within that folder), the number of files in the folder, etc’¦ This utility could be very useful to identify the largest folder on your computer, which may indicate what is consuming the space. I suggest you download this utility, scan the folders on your computer and sort by size and then sort by ‘Size of files’. If you need further guidance once you have completed these steps, highlight all the folders (’Edit’ menu > ‘Select All’) then go to the ‘View’ menu > ‘HTML Report (Horizontal)’ and email me this report. Please make sure you sort the folders by size before generating the report, as the report is an exact copy of what is displayed in the FoldersReport window (so if the folders are not sorted, the report will not be sorted either).

Regarding the second problem of the virus scanner, without knowing what virus scanner you are using, it would be difficult for me to give specifics on fixing the problem. However, my initial suggestion would be reinstall the antivirus software. In most circumstances this will fix the problem. If not, please contact me again with the specific name and version of your antivirus software.