When you update antivirus programs

Hi...great forum. I am new at this and I have a question about antivirus programs and my hard drive.

I have a relatively small hard drive (8.1 Gigs) so I'm always trying to be careful about what I store on it. I've been watching it shrink from about 2.8 gigs to the present size of about 2.76 gigs for no apparent reason; I haven't downloaded any programs, or kept anything that I'm aware of. The only thing that I know of that downloads anything is my AntiVir program from Avira.

My question is do these antivirus updates just keep piling up on my hard drive? If they do, I can conceivably run out of disk space in a pretty short period of time at this rate.

Thanks for any help,
jerry

PS
I run CCleaner often, so I know it's not temporary files, etc.

 

No, usually the update files are replaced as they are updates, so they don't just "pile up." But this is not a real problem with 6 gig to play around with. Also Dr Web uses laughably small update files. The whole install directory is roughly 8 meg with updates. So that might be a way to go if you are truly concerned.

 

Hello fellow Canadian:

Just a few thoughts for you

The last thing you want to skimp on space for is security updates, which as has been mentioned take very little space on drives.

What settings are you using on CCleaner? Check all tabs.

There are dozens of tricks to learn about Windows available,
ranging from compression, to limiting restore point storage, to disabling folder cache options etc etc.

Have you done a defrag lately?

With a small drive you can store large rarely used files on CD's.

Is it possible you have an application that does it's own cummulative backups?

I have 1 it is called Quicken.

 

or maybe you recently updated your windows?

 

It depends on the program how updates are handled.
A lot of programs have a cleanup when they update.

That's a very good point.Defragging can help sometimes.

 

That is a very good point. I hate to sound to muxh like an advertisement but if you're looking for defragmentation software, above and beyond the XP default, may I suggest mstdefrag (here) It defrag automatically in the background and only costs $15...it's just freakin' sweet!

Enough said.

 

defrag
turn off system restore
clear your restore points with diskcleanup (in system tools in xp)

that alone, should save you a huge amount of space.

 

Thanks all for the feedback. I have System Restore turned off as i use a program called ERUNT which does a full backup of my Registry and I store it on a Flash drive. Just shutting off System Restore saved me a ton of space.

As far as CCleaner...I have most options checked...a few aren't because I don't want to delete that info.

I use the "Diskeeper" defragmenter...it runs automatically every 72 hours.

Thanks for the info about anti-virus updates not "piling up"...that was my major concern. Take care...great group...thankyou.

jerry

 

glad you listened to the system restore i mentioned, but turning it off wont just save, you have to delete the images it has already created (sorry if you have already deleted these, just making sure)

start > all programs > accessories > system tools > diskcleanup

select c: drive

click the tab "more options"

click 'clean up' next to system restore

go back to the original screen once you have clicked that once

click ok and perform those actions.

-----------------------
if you have already done this, then im just waffling on.

but for people wanting to save some HD space, this has been known to save 1-4 GB on some peoples machines.

 

i thought turning system restore off will automatically delete all restore points?

and i dont think system restore create images...

 

it does

nope, it doesnt