Ask HMF anything

Maybe he is a Herald with benefits. :smirking_face:

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The Key for a gilded cage?

I’m so sorry HMF

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Saaaaay… that almost looks like a :scream:

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Got a question for some of the more PC-tech-savvy members here… (@Urben @EvilGeniusRo @Count.Rushmore )

Since my last Windows update last week, I´ve been dealing with constantly decreasing storage space. Before the update, I had some 15 GB of free space on my main drive. After the update, it went down to roughly 9 (a bigger decrease than usual). Now, a decrease after an update is normal, and I generally do a cleanup after that via the System options to delete the old update backup, which I did this time as well. Usually that brings up the free space to roughly where it had been prior to the update, but this time it only deleted slightly over 1 GB, so I was left with some 10 GB. Not great, but whatever. Only the storage space kept decreasing - something I never experienced before. So I deleted/moved nearly 6 GB worth of data (meaning I had some 14 GB, just to keep track), but the space would still keep decreasing. Doing further cleanups via System or Revo didn´t help.

So afterwards, I started digging in Local files and found out that Chrome temp files are taking up 8 GB of space, which - after discovering some Chrome features I didn´t even know were a thing, lol - I found out are stored data files from websites. Chrome actually said that a whopping 67 GB of data are being taken up by these, but that was off. Anyways, Reddit alone took 4 GB, so I deleted those first, but my storage space would still keep decreasing disproportionately to the amount of new data saved (as in I deleted more than the new browsing generated, but still my storage would get lower rather than higher), so eventually I just deleted everything.

All in all, I´ve deleted/moved some 7 GB worth of files and deleted some 8 GB worth of Chrome website data files. Even when considering some app updates upon boot-up which I might not be outright aware of could´ve taken up space (AV, Teams, Whatsapp, Steam/GOG/RGL/Uplay/whatever), that should still put me above 20 GB of free storage, yet I´m barely at 16, and naturally this goes down the more I browse (so then I have to delete the website data pretty much all the time), or just goes down a few hundred MB for the lols.

I know I might come out as completely dumb despite using a PC on a daily basis :joy:, but I´m really not the technical type, so I´m frankly stumped at what to do (not to mentioned annoyed/pissed off). What went wrong? What am I missing or should look at / try to do to stop this? Because like I said, this kind of rapid progressive decreasing never happened to me before. Unless I installed something myself or there was an update, my storage space generally remained the same (I check disk space and try to do cleanups rather often) :confused: Any help on what to try and do would be appreciated.

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At this point I can only assume that you catched a virus somehow, and it’s eating your hard drive.
Run an anti-virus check, preferably by a few (not one) antivirus apps or utilities, and also, just to be sure, you can check with a few (not one) anti-malware apps.
There are tons of them ob the Internet, I don’t think you’ll be hard looking on them.
I will recommend Kaspersky, Avira, Nod32 antivirus utilities and AdwCleaner anti-malware.
If this doesn’t help, we might move on further, or someone else could dig more deeply on the matter.

Also, I would recommend to get rid of all kinds of “cleaners” which are not really cleaning, but rubbishing the system

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Sounds more like a Chrome issue that happens to occur after you updated Windows.

I don’t have Chrome but after taking a look there seems to be no nice option to limit the website cache. A suggestion I saw is to right-click on Chrome (the link on your desktop, not the exe in some program folder) and add --disk-cache-size=1000000000 to the target path which currently ends with something like ...\chrome.exe". Don’t forget to add a space in between. That would limit it to roughly 1GB.

Still I think that sounds like a bug and you should keep your Chrome up to date for the case it gets fixed.

Btw when I was using Windows I had the program TreeSize which you can use to scan you drive to see which folders contain how much data. It was always very handy to find culprits of wasted space.

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A gilded cage is a mission in HITMAN 2016

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I use an something called HiBit Uninstaller to clean registries and junk files. I also use it to uninstall stuff because it removes everything related to an application so no junk left behind :grin:

As in Anti Virus? Ew, stick with Microsoft’s Defender, don’t bother with anything else :face_with_tongue:

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Okay, this is good to know, thank you!

…it’s a chastity cage.

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I don’t know what that is

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You are too pure, my friend. Don’t change :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

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Man, I do hope that´s not the case… I didn´t visit any sites that I normally don´t visit, running checks was one of the first things I did and it didn´t show anything. Norton came up with nothing, Defender shows nothing, and I installed Malwarebytes which also shows nothing (aside from two false positives in the form of dgVoodoo2).

I only have Revo Uninstaller which I´ve been using for years and never had an issue with it (quite the opposite really).

Thanks. I´ve added the command line, see if it helps with this particular issue.

Chrome is up to date. I only pause Windows updates every time for a while so I don´t get them on a daily basis.

Yeah, I´ve seen a lot of people online mentioning TreeSize for this kind of stuff. I installed it and ran a scan, and it seems one of the potential culprits is the Nvidia App (if not the major one). Which would make sense, since on the same day as the Windows update, I wanted to update my Nvidia driver after a long time, but it no longer worked via Geforce Experience, as apparently they´ve changed this to Nvidia App now, so I installed that instead. And looking at TreeSize, the Nvidia folder is occupying almost 5 GB. The Nvidia App is more than 3 GB, specifically an ota-artifacts/grd folder, and another 1,3 GB is the NV_cache folder. Question is whether any of this can be deleted.

Still doesn´t seem to be enough to make the math work properly, and doesn´t explain the Chrome cache thing, but this one at least makes sense since I installed it on the same day.

The GOG Galaxy folder also seems to be unnecessarily large (compared to similar apps), taking 1,8 GB, mainly the logs and webcache folders.

And the Windows/Servicing/LCU folder has almost 2 GB, half of which is a folder from the day of the update - is that a safety backup, or…?

Btw after cleaning the Chrome cache completely on Friday night, I had 16,2 GB left. Today when I booted up the laptop, it was some 15,9, then during the day oscillated between going as low as 14,3 and as high as 16,7. App updates and background processes I guess? (I assume this is normal, but this past week has made me incredibly paranoid :joy: ). Now it´s 16, so prettymuch stable, but I haven´t really used the internet today :roll_eyes:

Oh, and I don´t know if it´s just my imagination, but ever since the update, after booting up the laptop, the fan runs like mad before settling down. I don´t think it was ever that intense before, but again, I have no idea if it´s related or not, and could just be due to background processes I guess? (also, the fan is most certainly going to shit, so it just might sound louder :joy: )

Is it good? I normally use Revo for cleanups, but might need extra help now. Made the mistake the other day of uninstalling Skype the normal way, and now found out via TreeSize there are over 300MB of junk files left, so I need to get rid of them :grin:

Yeah… I´ll probably have to… :sweat_smile: Didn´t use to have a problem with Norton until I didn´t renew my subscription last year (there wasn´t enough money on the registered account, lol), so it suddenly started bombing me with warnings about dozens of thousands of files and broken registries and whatnots slowing down my PC. Pissed me off to no end :joy: (got renewd in the meantime, but I think it´ll be the last time they get my money - plus I get more disk space from uninstalling it :grin: )

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Oh yeah, I’ve been using it for over two years now and I never had issues with it. I even use an older version on my WinXP PC. :grin:

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Why do people keep talking about wanting the Solstice Suit with a Providence pin? I feel like every time there’s a conversation about which suits people want in a future update, that idea gets brought up.

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Don’t forget about me asking for a Tactical Turtleneck with gloves on an unending loop.

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Unfortunately, unless I did it wrong, that doesn´t seem to work :roll_eyes: