23 Jun 2013

What happened to my PC memory?

My 7 year old Dell laptop with 30GB hard drive decided to tell me that I had no memory left today. I did the usual tricks: ran CCleaner, emptied the recycle bin got rid of lots of temporary files etc but still seemed to have freed up only a little. Then I searched the C drive for large files not in My Documents and sub-folders. To my amazement I found WSPRX and other similar programs had been storing WAV files of every time I'd used the software! In total over 5GB of disk space.  Having cleared these - no doubt there is an option to stop saving these - and moving little used files off the PC, I now have over 14GB of space. After a defrag and a full virus scan it is ticking along nicely. MS Essentials does a good job of keeping the rubbish out and CCleaner is excellent for house keeping.

5 comments:

VE9KK said...

My feeling is that a 7 year old laptop has served it's time and is retiring from a long and well deserved time of service.
Mike

Paul Stam PAØK said...

I am using WSPRX also but can't find any wav files on my PC. I was looking in Program Files > wspr... but nothing. Or is there another sub map?

Roger G3XBM said...

Mike, I have promised myself a new laptop when we move to the new QTH in August.

Paul, there is (in my case) a sub directory called "save" in the WSPR and WSPRX directories and all the saved audio files were in there. I'll see how to turn this option (I presume it is and not necessary for decoding) off, or at least clean it out regularly. CCleaner leaves them there as it thinks I want them all still!

Anonymous said...

Roger, I have noticed the same behaviour by WSPRX. Although there is a menu item called Save which I set to None, it still is saving all as .wav files. I guess it is a bug in the program.

Robert, LA4ANA

Anonymous said...

Roger,

I got caught on the same issue with WSPR until I figured out how to turn off the saving of .wav files. I forget off hand but it is a selection in one of the menus.

And, as to your 7 year old laptop being past it's prime; bollocks! I have an old Dell (forget the model number) PIII 800Mhz with 512Mb ram and a 8Gb Sandisk set up as a hardrive running Linux and it gets regular use out in the field were I would rather not take my newer laptop for simple tasks like logging and it even runs fldigi quite nicely. It is not my primary computer but comfortably fills the role as a secondary or tiertiary machine. It will only get retired when it passes quietly onto Calculator Heaven.