laptop hard drive filling by itself?

cosgrove80

A friend has a laptop running Win 98. He has a C:\ drive of 1.8GB with aprox 330MB free.

If he leaves the computer on for a while the free space becomes less and less and eventually the computer freezes.

Does anybody know why this happens?

I've told him to put the virtual memory onto the E:\ drive and thats filling up now instead so I'm guessing it's a memory problem. He has 128MB of RAM.

Is there any chance this is happening because of a virus/trojan? The fact it happens without him launching any programs is strange.

A process "USBmonit" is causing an illegal operation regularly too which I assume is a process for his USB mem. stick? Are they i anyway connected do you think?

I haven't used Windows 98 for ages and I was trying to help him over the phone to no avail.

Appreciate any help. Sorry for another badly composed post but it is nearly midnight on friday

Thanks

girldef

Get him to download spybot search and destroy to make sure there is no ad ware or any other crud like that and do a system scan but its probably the lack of disk space causing the problem, he could get an external harddrive.

Tom Dunne

Certainnly do the Spybot/Adaware scans, but I think it is more to do with Virtual Memory - 330Mb is very low, even for Windows 98.

What may be happening is that as processes start up, they start requesting memory. Not much physical memory is available, so the OS starts using the disk as virtual memory. When it runs out of disk space/virtual memory, it can't do a lot, so freezes up. Check what is in Start->Programs->Accessories->System Tools->System information. Go to the startup tab and start un-checking any crap that is not needed at boot-up (the USB memory card sounds like one).

DonkeyStyle \o/

Yeah start>run>msconfig is usualy a good start.
In addition to the spyware/adware apps, I'd suggest a nice long virus scan aswell.

Tivoli

do like they says and....

try cacheman too

tribble

There's a memory leak.

ie. some program is taking memory for itself, not reallocating it again when it's finished and then just taking more.

This is a very common problem (windows 95 did it all by itself) but isn't usually serious unless the incremenetal amounts of memory are large and frequent.

You have to figure out what is causing it (probably spyware or badly written software) and stop it loading.

cosgrove80

Thanks for all the replies.

I'll get him to install Spybot. Problem is he has no net connection.

Thought of Msconfig too but it's not the easiest thing to do over the phone.

I'll get him to get Spybot and AVG and see how it goes.

Thanks

rw227

try ewido anti-most-things ... there is a download link on http://www.nod32.ie . I've just discovered this util and it's great.

bfn