Last Updated on December 4, 2019 by Christopher G Mendla
I was working with a client’s machine the other day trying to free up some disk space. They had less than 1 gig left and the machine was getting a little quirky. The amount of space used just didn’t make sense.
I did a search for files over 1 MB and noticed that there seemed to be a bunch of files in a ‘files to be written to CD folder’. What had happened was that the client had tried to free up space by writing files to CD using the Windows CD writer. However, in the process, they somehow left all of the temporary files in place (I’m not sure exactly how that happened). There was 58 Gigabites worth of files in the CD Burner folder.
I got really lucky in that a lot of the files that were written to CD were over 1 MB. Otherwise, it would have been a little harder to figure out where the missing disk space was.
One clue that this is a problem is the “There are files waiting to be written to the CD, Click this balloon” message. However, this message is peculiar to the user that has the files waiting. If you log in as another user, you will not see the message.
You can check for this manually a couple of ways. In any case, you will need to go into TOOLS, FOLDER OPTIONS, VIEW in Windows explorer and make sure you are showing hidden and system files.
One is to do a search for “CD Burning” using the windows search facility.
Another way is to check each user’s cd buring folder by navigating to
C:Documents and Settings[user]Local SettingsApplication DataMicrosoftCD Burning
where [user] is the Windows user name.