How to increase disk space in case of Low Disk space

Trouble:

Do you feel that the free space on your hard-disk is too little ? Does it seem that something fishy is going on which is eating your hard-disk space? If your answer is yes, read on till end to uncover the secrets of this type of behavior.

Reasons for consumption of free space

Some of the key reasons are:

• Temp files on C drive
• Temporary Internet files
• Backup files created during installation
• Windows system restore data
• Duplicate copies of large files like movies, songs etc.
• Deleting Uninstall files for windows updates.

There are some more reasons as well, but these are most common reasons which can be observed. Now the important question, how to fix it ? Lets read on for the solution.

Fix:

1. Deleting Temp files:

Temp files are the files which are created for some temporary purpose by many softwares. Go to Start > Run type “%temp” (without quotes) and press enter. This will open a Temp folder, at this folder,select and delete all files at this location. After this empty your windows recycle bin.

Note: You may not be able to delete certain files as they might be in use, but delete as many as you can.

2. Deleting Temporary Internet files and backup files:

There are several ways to do it, but we will tell you the most convenient way. Open My computer, right click on the disk drive , go to properties and click on Disk Cleanup as shown below:

This will open a Disk cleanup window as seen below:

Select the temporary Internet files,recycle bin,setup log files, temporary files, office setup files, and any other option which is not very important for you and Click OK. This will start the cleanup process and will delete the un-necessary files thus increasing the disk space.

Note: Above two methods deals with removal of junk and temporary internet files which can also be removed automatically using a software called CCleaner which can be downloaded from here.

What is CCleaner?

CCleaner removes unused and temporary files from your system - allowing it to run faster, more efficiently and giving you more HDD space.

3. Deleting old restoration data:

As a part of system restore utility, windows creates some check-points and saves corresponding data on each disk having restore feature. These files also consume significant space. You can delete all of them except the most recent restore point data if you feel that your computer is running stable for a long time and you may not need very old restore points. To delete it, open disk cleanup window as mentioned in previous step and click on More Options tab as shown below:

Click on System restore clean up button as highlighted in red circle in image above. This will give a warning message, click yes to it. This will delete all old restoration points except the most recent one.

4 .Delete duplicate copies of large files:

Sometimes we have several copies of same documents, songs and even videos which consume lots of space un-necessarily. Finding them manually and deleting them is a real pain. But this work has been made very easy by double-killer. Its an intelligent utility which scans your drives for duplicate copies of files and gives you and option to delete them. You can download it from here for free.

5. Deleting Uninstall files for windows updates:

You can also delete some folders whose name starts with “$NtUninstall.” in the windows directory (for example C:\Windows ) if C drive is the primary partition.

However, They are referring to prior hot fixes, so they should be safe to delete if your system is stable with the fixes applied after windows update, and you have no intention of uninstalling them.

We hope that this article will help you see more free space out of your drives!

How to protect your computer from virus in pen drives

Trouble:

We have received lot of problems where computers got infected easily by the viruses in the pen drives, pen drives have become one of the most easiest carriers of various types of viruses these days.

We will tell you how pen drives normally infect your computer systems and how can you open pen drive safely and back up your important data.

How a virus in your pen drive infects?

Most of the active viruses infect your windows system as soon as you double click on the Pen Drive icon in your my computer. As virus always creates a autorun.inf file which is a system ,hidden and a read only file on your pen drive. It point to the main virus file which is also located on the pen drive. When user double clicks on the pen drive files pointed by the autorun.inf got executed which copies the virus files on your system.

The image below shows the Autorun file entries in some special characters when you right click on the drive.

Let’s see how can you protect yourself by following certain practices.

Fix:

Let’s discuss these practices one by one:

1. Disable Autorun on Your Pen Drive:

• Open to Start >> Run and type “gpedit.msc” (without quotes) and press enter. This will open Group policy editor.
• Browse to Administrative templates >> System >> double click on Turn off Autoplay click on Enabled and Under Settings >> Select All Drives in the drop down and click OK
  

2. Scan Your Pen Drive:

Whenever you insert your pen drive / portable drive into USB port on your system make sure to run a virus scan with your anti virus before opening your pen drive contents in windows explorer.

3. Use FreeCommander:

FreeCommander is again a file explorer like windows explorer, so you just need to download it by clicking here and install it.

After installing open your pen drive through FreeCommander

Check if there are some additional files like autorun.inf , Funny UST Scandal.avi.exe ,Ravmon.exe ,New Folder.exe etc or any other file which you have not copied or created, delete all these suspicious files on your pen drive.

Quick Update: 26th March 2008

4. Use your virus infected pen drive: You can also use your virus infected pen drives to copy your important data in worst circumstances.

How to backup your important data when your pen drive is infected with a virus

a. Insert your pen drive into the usb port, if it detects your drive you will see it in my computer.

b. Now don’t double click on your drive, rather open the pen drive contents by typing the drive letter.

For Example: type g: and press enter if your pen drive is shown as new g drive under my computer.

c. Copy your important files from your pen drive close the window and format your pen drive after then.

If you are still suspicious about the existence virus files on your pen drive, you can remove virus from your pen drive through command prompt by the method suggested by Madhur here in this article

USB pen drive detected but doesn’t show up in My Computer

Trouble:

You may have faced a problem when you insert your pen drive and it gets detected very easily but it doesn’t show up as a drive icon in My Computer. The computer detects the pen drive but data on pen drive is not visible as the pen drive is not visible in My Computer (Explorer).

This problem occurs mainly when windows XP fails to allocate a drive letter to your portable drive(pen drive). It occurs mostly with new pen drives connected to your computer for the first time. If you face such problem then it may not be the pen drive’s fault, rather it may be windows trouble.

Fix:

You can fix this issue by following some simple steps given below.

1. Click Start, click Run, type compmgmt.msc, and then click OK.

2. In the console tree, click Disk Management. The Disk Management window will appear.

3. On this disk management window, you can see some drives including the portable drive. Right click on your portable drive and click change drive letter and paths.

4. Now a assign a new drive letter which is not being used by any of your drives in My Computer.

5. After assigning the new drive letter your portable drive will show up in my computer with other drives

We hope the above solution will help to fix this trouble.

Trouble:

You may have faced a problem when you insert your pen drive and it gets detected very easily but it doesn’t show up as a drive icon in My Computer. The computer detects the pen drive but data on pen drive is not visible as the pen drive is not visible in My Computer (Explorer).

This problem occurs mainly when windows XP fails to allocate a drive letter to your portable drive(pen drive). It occurs mostly with new pen drives connected to your computer for the first time. If you face such problem then it may not be the pen drive’s fault, rather it may be windows trouble.

Fix:

You can fix this issue by following some simple steps given below.

1. Click Start, click Run, type compmgmt.msc, and then click OK.

2. In the console tree, click Disk Management. The Disk Management window will appear.

3. On this disk management window, you can see some drives including the portable drive. Right click on your portable drive and click change drive letter and paths.

4. Now a assign a new drive letter which is not being used by any of your drives in My Computer.

5. After assigning the new drive letter your portable drive will show up in my computer with other drives

We hope the above solution will help to fix this trouble.

How to avoid chkdsk disk scan at every time booting windows

Trouble:

Recently we received a problem from one of the readers on system run a chkdsk disk scan again and again at every time on booting windows.

Let’s see how we can solve the problem of disk scan running every time of boot on windows.

Fix:

Disc scan is one of the protective feature of windows which runs to clean any cross-links or bad sectors that may be generated because of the improper shutdown of windows due to some reason. So, when ever you shutdown your system in some improper way ,the next time you boot your windows you will see scan disk running which you can stop by pressing an key on time.

But in some cases as experienced by some of the windows users, disk scan runs every time they reboot, this happens because of the following reasons:

1. Improper shutdown(most common).

2. External hard drive or portable drive attached which causes scan disk to scan them at every reboot.

3. chkdsk was not allowed to be completed at the time of boot.

Above reasons are normally the most common reasons behind this problem, but none of them matches with your case then, you probably have a dirty volume on your hard drive which has some bad sectors which does not get repaired at the time of reboot.

Here is a link to info about understanding of dirty volumes.

So, at every reboot chkdsk tries to repair those dirty bits on those bad sectors on your hard drive in those specific partitions.

But, don’t worry as you can simply fix this problem of disc scanning at every reboot.

Just follow the procedure given below:

You need to do a manual chkdsk on all the partitions or physical hard drives.

1. Open start>>run and type “cmd”(without double quotes)

2. Type “chkntfs /x ”(without double quotes) For example: chkntfs /x d:

3. Run this command for all the partitions of your hard drive.

4. Reboot your computer properly it will not do a disk scan again.

We hope this solves your problem…do lets us know through comments if you have any issues.

How to remove Win32/NSAnti, d.com virus without any anti-virus tool

Recently we received a mail from one of our readers whose computer was infected by Win32/NSAnti virus, this virus mainly causes drive opening problem by double click in windows XP.

If your system is infected by this virus you can’t see hidden files and folders , even after applying the settings to show hidden folders. This setting is reverted back to Don’t show hidden files and folders by the virus.

This happens because virus protects the two hidden ,system files called d.com and autorun,inf which are created by amvo.exe and amvo0.dll , amvo1.dll which resides in system32 folder on the OS drive (hard disk partition on which windows operating system is installed).

Fix:

In order to fix the problems caused by this virus ,you will need to delete all these files created by the virus.

Follow the set of commands to delete these files

1. Open Start>>Run and type cmd and press enter. This will open windows command prompt window. On this window, type as directed in steps further and press enter at the end of each step.

2. type cd\

3. type cd windows\system32

4. type attrib -r -h -s amvo.exe

5. type del amvo.exe

6. type attrib -r -h -s avmo0.dll ,repeat the steps 5 and 6 again to delete avmo1.dll

7. now type d: and press enter for d: drive partition.

8. type attrib -r -h -s autorun.inf

9. type del autorun.inf

10. type attrib -r -h -s d.com

11. type del d.com

Similarly repeat from steps 8 to 11 for all your hard disk partitions to remove the files created by the virus.

Note: Above procedure may seems cumbersome but proves to be of great help to repair your system, if none of your anti-virus tools is able to solve the problem and remove the infections caused by the virus.

Updated (21 Jan 2008):

We have just received some comments by the users who do not find above method useful as they were not able to remove amvo.exe virus by following the above method.

For all those who are facing issues with the above method, can follow the steps given below to remove the virus.

1. First download Trend Micro HijackThis from here

2. Install and run the scan ,you will see an entry like this :

HKCU\..\Run: [amva] C:\WINDOWS\system32\amvo.exe

3. Check the above entry and click on the button which says Fix Checked and click yes on the prompt.

4. Uncheck amvo.exe from msconfig>> startup (type msconfig in run and click on the startup tab) also and restart your system

5. Open my computer and go to folder options >> check the option show hidden files and folders. Also un-check the option Hide protected operating system files (This will give a warning message, confirm by pressing yes button). After this click Ok.

6. Now access all your system drives by typing the drive letters in the address bar (for example c:) and delete the files like autorun.inf and other file with a name ms18us.exe (sorry but I am not sure about the second file name )

7. Also delete the files amvo.dll and amvo1.dll from windows/system32 folder.

Updated ( 28 Jan 2008)

Note: Looks like that for most of the people both of the above methods are little bit confusing in terms of implementation.

So we would like tell another method to remove amvo and ampo virus by using a vbscript which you can download from http://www.en.mygeekside.com/?p=18 by clicking here. You can easily remove the virus by double clikcing the script.

PS: But we dont take any responsibilty if this script causes any damage to your system so use it on your own risk.

We hope the new solution for removal of win32/ns anti virus will help.

Task Manager disabled problem in windows xp

We have received mails from some readers of Trouble Fixers about task manager is disabled on their system suddenly.

Problem: It is due to some kind of virus/ trojan activity which normally disables the task manager.Now due to this problem when ever the user press alt+ctrl+del to launch windows task manager it gives an error saying “Task Manager is being disabled by your administrator”.

Solution:

To Enable the Disabled Task Manager on your system

1. Press window key+r to show run prompt

2. Follow the following steps

1. Enter gpedit.msc in the run prompt and click OK
2. In the Group Policy settings window
3. Select User Configuration
4. Select Administrative Templates
5. Select System
6. Select Ctrl+Alt+Delete options
7. Select Remove Task Manager
8. Double-click the Remove Task Manager option’.
9. Set the property of this item as disabled.

Updated on 12th FEB 2008

For Those who use Windows XP Home Edition can use the registry to enable Task Manager

1. open start >> run and type regedit

2. Navigate to the following path:

Hive: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
3. You will find a registry key with name DisableTaskMgr of type: REG_DWORD
4. Double click the key with and set the Value to 0

5. Exit the registry and restart to see the effect.

If you still get problems in enabling the disabled task manager on your windows XP system , please let us know through your comments.

Registry editing has been disabled by your administrator

Trouble:

We have been receiving lots of mails from our readers having problems with the registry editing on their system mostly because of virus activity.

Whenever they open Run and type regedit and press enter a message prompt appears saying “Registry editing has been disabled by your administrator“.

Let’s see how can we fix it.

Fix:

There are two ways through which you can enable registry editing in windows XP

Method 1:

You can use a simple UnHookExec.inf to enable registry editing.

1. Download UnHookExec.inf

2. Right click on the downloaded file and select install.

Method 2:

For enabling you can also use the remove restrictions tool by Sergiwa.com, if the method 1 doesn’t work for you.

1. First Download Remove Restrictions Tool

2. Run and check the registry tools and click apply.

Method 3:

if the above two methods does not work for you , you can also try executing a small vbscript which I found on major geeks.

1. First Download EnableRegEdit.vbs

2. Double click on the downloaded file to enable registry editing.

We hope at least one of the above will help to fix the trouble.

Not able to open drives on hard disk by double click

Trouble:

Sometimes it happens in windows XP that you are not able to open drives on your hard disk. When you double clicking on the drives icons or right click on the drive>>explore in My computer ,the drive does not open.

This problem is generally caused by most of the viruses which infect windows XP system. They block or restrict your access to any of the drives.

But don’t worry this is not a big trouble it can be fixed easily.

Fix:

Normally when a virus infects a windows system which causes a drive opening problem, it automatically creates a file named autorun.inf in the root directory of each drive.

This autorun.inf file is a read only ,hidden and a system file and the folder option is also disabled by the virus. This is deliberately done by the virus in order to protect itself. autorun.inf initiates all the activities that the virus performs when you try to open any drive.

You have to just delete this file and restart your system to correct this problem.

Follow the set of commands below to show and delete the autorun.inf

1. Open Start>>Run and type cmd and press enter. This will open a command prompt window. On this command prompt window type the following steps.

2. type cd\

3. type attrib -r -h -s autorun.inf

4. type del autorun.inf

5. now type d: and press enter for d: drive partition. Now repeat steps 3 and 4. Similarly repeat step 5 for all your hard disk partition.

Restart your system and your trouble will be fixed.