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#%?!&$@ windows

thenzero

thenzero

Experienced Member
Joined
Feb 19, 2021
Messages
430
Location
Perry, GA
I gotta rant for a second…

My parents called me with a computer issue. Their computer had slowed to a crawl and Windows was warning that their 1TB hard drive was full, but they couldn’t locate more than two hundred gigabytes or so of files. So I went over and had a look and was as dumbfounded as they were. No folders seemed to be using anywhere near that amount of space. So I brought the disk home and had a peek with a Linux box. There, in c:\Windows\Temp, I found 760GB (yes that’s GIGABYTES) of “cab” files, dating from 2016 all the way to now. Apparently windows just fills this folder up with these useless files and never cleans it out? And it didn’t appear in size estimation at the top level! The cynical person might conclude that this is planned obsolescence…my parents were certainly ready to buy a new computer…

/rant over
 
Just run disk cleanup from time to time, it would take care of this type of issue. Those cab files are there so you can step back from windows updates if you need to.

Also, I would note that I have run into similar issues with Linux, and had to go and manually delete a ton of old kernels to free up most of the space on a machine. Not sure why the OS did not automatically remove them when not needed, but I think Ubuntu has solved that issue with their later versions, though it possible they simply no longer make a 100Mb boot volume that gets filled with kernel files, I've not really looked TBH.

Note to respondents on this thread, please do not turn it into a Windows hate fest, I would rather not have to close it.
 
Good information to know though. Thanks. Was this with Windows 10 or older?
 
I had a similar problem a while back on my W7 gamer and turned out to be a whole bunch of Nvidia drivers that somehow were never deleted. In this case the entire 1TB M2 drive was filled up. I now use an app that searches the drives periodically for fat folders.
 
They ran disk cleanup and so did I. It didn’t remove or report these files. I’m not sure they’re what you’re saying either, they started with “cab” and then a number but most of them were 0 bytes (about 30000 of these) and about 6500 of them around 120mb each.

Edit: this was in response to lutiana not agent Orange
 
Last edited:
tradde said:
Good information to know though. Thanks. Was this with Windows 10 or older?
Click to expand...

Windows 7

in googling about this issue, some folks mentioned using a utility to keep these files cleaned up, probably the same one mentioned by agent Orange
 
thenzero said:
They ran disk cleanup and so did I. It didn't remove or report these files. I'm not sure they're what you're saying either, they started with "cab" and then a number but most of them were 0 bytes (about 30000 of these) and about 6500 of them around 120mb each.
Click to expand...

That's odd, the disk cleanup is supposed to offer you the ability to delete the temp folder stuff. Maybe you have to also scan system files in order to be offered that option?


Agent Orange said:
I had a similar problem a while back on my W7 gamer and turned out to be a whole bunch of Nvidia drivers that somehow were never deleted. In this case the entire 1TB M2 drive was filled up. I now use an app that searches the drives periodically for fat folders.
Click to expand...

Yeah, the nvidia drivers do that. The download is just a container, which extracts the installer and then runs it. Once it's done, the installer does not delete itself. So if you don't remove them you end up with a folder in the roof of your drive with quite a few different version installers.
 
thenzero said:
Windows 7

in googling about this issue, some folks mentioned using a utility to keep these files cleaned up, probably the same one mentioned by agent Orange
Click to expand...
I'm on my laptop right now but I'll post a link to that app when I get on my gamer tonight.
 
lutiana said:
That's odd, the disk cleanup is supposed to offer you the ability to delete the temp folder stuff. Maybe you have to also scan system files in order to be offered that option?
Click to expand...

It is odd. What’s also odd is that the size of that folder didn’t show up when I checked size for the parent folder (Windows), which appeared as only about 50GB in size.
 
By the way, the disk cleanup did offer to empty Temp but it reported that 0 bytes would be recovered so we didn’t bother.
 
It's not always windows files that are kludging your HD up. As I mentioned above, stored video driver files and the like are sometimes overlooked.
 
tradde said:
That is very odd. CAB files are Windows cabinet files (compressed of course) that holds data that can be used by Windows. I wonder if it ignores CAB files.

I found this web page: https://www.computerworld.com/articl...ard-drive.html
Click to expand...

They aren’t .cab files, they just start with the letters cab. The extension was txt, I believe.

edit: Sorry, I realize I worded it poorly when I said they were “cab files”.
 
lutiana said:
Also, I would note that I have run into similar issues with Linux, and had to go and manually delete a ton of old kernels to free up most of the space on a machine. Not sure why the OS did not automatically remove them when not needed, but I think Ubuntu has solved that issue with their later versions, though it possible they simply no longer make a 100Mb boot volume that gets filled with kernel files, I've not really looked TBH..
Click to expand...

I don't know what version of Linux you're running, but if it's Ubuntu or Debian (or any derivative), "apt autoremove" is always the last step in my update: i.e. as root:

apt update ; apt upgrade ; apt autoremove

Don't know what it is in GUI-talk. I don't live there.

An odd thing--in the Buster ISO downloaded from the US servers, the "fortune" program is the Italian version. "apt purge fortunes-it ; apt install fortune" fixes it.
 
I've never seen thousands of cab*.txt files in any of my computers. I'd say it isn't Windows doing it at all, but something else. Did you have a close look for malware?

Also, did you tell Windows to show all files including hidden and system?
 
Robbbert said:
I've never seen thousands of cab*.txt files in any of my computers. I'd say it isn't Windows doing it at all, but something else. Did you have a close look for malware?

Also, did you tell Windows to show all files including hidden and system?
Click to expand...

I appreciate the sentiment but wasn’t really looking for troubleshooting help.

Just wanted to vent for a minute :-D

(Yes we scanned for viruses and malware, all definitions up to date, show all sure, it seems to be some kind of odd permissions thing if you want a technical analysis, where even administrators on the computer don’t have permissions to get folder sizes from above, if this was malware it’s been on the computer since purchase because those files date back to the day it turned on)
 
I've seen OneDrive go off the rails and resync a new folder every day until it consumes every block of free space before.

Use a tool like windirstat to see where the data is being consumed, usually it sticks out like a sore thumb.

https://windirstat.net/
 
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