The 27-Gigabyte Culprit

I was shocked to learn I had only approximately 3 gigabytes left on my primary partition, out of a whopping forty (that’s not counting the other forty on the other partitions). It’s only been a few days since I’ve installed programs and moved files over to Risk. Heck, I haven’t even installed the huge Photoshop CS2, much less the whole CS2 suite!

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So I installed Folder Size to see what the fuss was (it’s silly Windows doesn’t have that tiny feature). I kept clicking away at the folder with the most scandalizing amount of bytes: 27 gigs. No, it wasn’t Program Files, which only used up a gig. It was something buried in my Documents and Settings profile. Something hidden. Something sneaky.

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It was a Temp folder TMP file.

This is why I am not fond of the words Cache and Temp, despite their noble goals. Nor do I understand the use of 50-meg WMDB files for music file info. And System Restore can get extremely tiring. All these make the computer inefficient in the long run especially if they are kept hidden by default. Processing power and memory are rendered useless when there’s not enough space to move around in; it will drag the system down.

Is this the price to pay for uncomplicatingabstracting computing processes from the end user? Instead of making the user understand that he/she must perform maintenance tasks regularly, i.e. taking out the scrap files and folders, the system is covering it up and making him/her believe the best solution is to get a faster machine and a larger hard drive.

Perhaps it doesn’t. But we remain uninformed, which is the most unfortunate state one could possibly be in.

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made in the Philippines by Sophia Lucero.