Curse of the 288Mb Files (I've Got Worms!)

I've not played World of Warcraft in some time, and I deleted it months ago to make room for other media--music, TV shows, movies, etc.--on Strombergast (my computer). But Burning Crusades is released next week, and not only do I have plans to rock my lvl60 Orc Hunter up to the new top of the talent tree (beastmastery is getting *so* buffed out!), but everyone and their little sister wants to roll Blood Elf Paladins to game with as a group. I've had the itch to game again for a bit, so I thought that now would be a good time to start prepping Strom for the updates. You know, run all those maintenance programs to get him back into shape, then delete some stuff I've not touched in months to help him lose some weight.

One of my favourite PC maintenance programs is freeware offering WinDirStat, which stands for Windows Directory Statistics. The thing that really gets me about WinDirStat is it's visual interface. Now, let me forewarn you that I'm the sort of person who will defragment my hard drive during the day when I'm up and about, because I actually like watching all those little coloured rectangles get relocated from down there to over here, changing colour depending on whether they're being read, can't be moved, or have been defragmented. I know, it doesn't seem like someone anyone should enjoy watching, but I do (though honestly, it was a lot more fun to watch on my first computer, an Aptiva Multimedia, when it was running the first version of Windows 95). Anyway, WinDirStat scans your hard drive, then gives every file type its own colour coded rectangle, arranging them in groups by folder. (I think it kind of ends up looking like glowing snake scales. ^_^) Then you can click on any point in the coloured area to see exactly what file that is: it's size, the date it was last changed, location on your comp, etc.

Take a gander at the screencap to the right. This is what I saw when I ran WinDirStat yesterday; I don't think I'd used the program since last Winter (tsk tsk). But I knew it would be good for helping me clean out my drive a little, because I could see what the majority of space was being used for. Now, I'm not a computer architect, but when I saw those two huge blue areas with all the succinctly aligned smaller files within them, I knew that wasn't right. Those areas sure as hell weren't there last run, plus--look around--no file type is full of files of exactly the same visual size. There's always a few megabytes difference here and there. Clicking on the leftmost blue section showed me that there were thousands of files (60, 878 files, to be precise) with names of things I'd never installed, all exactly 288Mb in size. Not good!

At this point, I recalled a few months ago (and by that, I mean maybe 8 or so) when I found two worms in Strom's system, which were promptly deleted and forgotten. Since there are two sections of these files, I can only assume those worms were the culprit. Such is a risk when you're doing lots of P2P downloading and don't always read the details for what you're clicking (/shame). But, knowing is half the battle! So I quickly and easily right-clicked and deleted both sections of blue 288Mb files, and voile! Almost 15Gbs of disk space was free at last, free at last. :) Compare the screen cap to the left with the one above, and you can see what a huge chunk of my hard drive that was. Now WoW is installed, patched, and ready to go once Burning Crusades makes its way to our explosive little apartment. :D Oh, and obviously, I don't got worms no more. ;)

Sidenote: When I was working at that women's boutique start-up two years ago, the owner had a span of several months where she had worms. Honestly, the woman had worms, like my cat Sno had worms when I was 12. Eventually, she gave them to her little daughter too. During the whole time she was infected (is that the term to use?) she'd walk around occasionally scratching/groping at her ass, because the worms made it itch. This woman would even tell people she had worms--customers she was talking with, artists who sold through the shop, people who really had no reason to know other than she liked to talk about herself--as she made pained faces while trying to avoid groping her ass. But I'm pretty sure that if ass-itching is not acceptable social etiquette, talking about how you want to isn't either.