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Hard Drive full - now XP not running properly - HELP!

Jan 5, 2013 1:10AM PST

I hope someone can help.

My daughter downloaded a huge amount of photo's from our camera to the C;Drive which wiped out the remaining memory.

Now when the pc starts it is not running my normal XP home desktop - it seems to be only showing the shared desktop icons and none of my programs are running correctly?

It is as if it is running in some sort of minimal mode because there was not sufficient memory but even though I've transferred all the photo's onto my USB drive, run CCleaner and now got 2gb hard drive space it still starts in this minimal way each time.

My Desktop folder is still in my User file with all my files visible under my computer. My programs files are still all under my User name also.

However when I click on something like Microsoft Office or another similar program it comes up with 'Preparing to Install' and tries to configure it....then fails.

Under Documents & Settings in the Local Disk (CHappy I have the usual Users files but also a blue TEMP file which I'm sure was not there before?

Is XP home running in a temporary mode because of the original memory issue? How can I get it back to running as it was? Everything still seems to be there just not starting up correctly nor allowing me to access some things?

HELP! Happy

Jason

Discussion is locked

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Need more info
Jan 5, 2013 1:22AM PST

It's hard to give you a precise answer because you neglected to mention how much RAM you have and the size of your hard drive. I can tell you that 2 GB is NOT enough free space. You should have at least 20 GB free. If you have 3 GB of RAM, Windows will want to create a 3 GB paging file, and it may want to create a 3 GB hibernation file. That's 6 GB there, and you need space for updates, System Restore files, etc.

Good luck.

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Re: hard drive full
Jan 5, 2013 9:06PM PST

Try to make more space:
- delete that blue TEMP file
- in all user accounts run the disc cleanup wizard
- in a administrator user account also run the advanced mode of the disc cleanup wizard to delete all but the latest system restore point

Kees