Solved Urgent help needed: Clearing space to install programs

Hello all,

I have a Lenovo Z580 running Windows 8 on a 256 GB SSD, which was cloned from the original drive using Paragon cloning software. I got the computer up and running about a month ago, and I started personalizing it by installing programs and such. At the beginning of today, I probably had around 25 GBs left of storage, which may not seem like much but it will last me until I need to be done with this computer.

Today I went to download a 5 GB zipped folder used to install MATLAB via a licensed, legit website (student license). I check after it downloads and I have roughly 20 GB left on my disk. Note that every other program I have installed has had no trouble with Windows 8 (including Mathematica), so I assumed MATLAB wouldn't either. I hit the setup button, and nothing seems to come up. I hit it again and this time it says something like "not allowed to create destination." So then I tried cutting and pasting it to the desktop, but there was some error with that too. I tried to use the setup application in other ways, and it still didn't work.

I then checked my free disk space and I had 100 MB of free space left. Uhm WHAT?! What the hell just happened?! I search through pretty much ALL my file folders to see what was newly written and see if I could find a TWENTY GIGABYTE folder that was created today. I couldn't find anything. What I think happened was that the setup application unpacked a bunch of files from the compressed folder SOMEWHERE on my disk, EACH TIME I hit setup. THEN it would hit a snag, for some reason, and stop the setup, and NOT delete the temporary files.

SO my next step was to use the "Disk Cleanup" option, to see if the theoretical temporary files could be deleted that way. It gets to the list and I discover that the "Temporary files" option is an INCREDIBLE 98.6 GB size. UHM WHAT?! How is it possible that my OS thinks it can safely delete nearly 100 GBs of data off my 256 GB hard drive?! What is it deleting exactly? Let's assume that 20 GB was in there; that still means it's deleting almost 80 GBs. I couldn't believe that. So obviously I haven't deleted that yet, because I fear that it thinks some of my programs, or maybe even the OS itself, is a bunch of temporary files. I don't even know. I do have a 30 GB recovery partition, so maybe that 30 is included in that, but EVEN THEN 50 GBs is a TON to be in temporary files.

My question: is there any way to check what will be deleted in the option "Temporary files" and why is my temporary files 38% of my entire drive? Also, what happened with the 20 GBs?

I labelled it urgent because I need to install MATLAB to use it for HW, but I can't. Well I think I can find another way to use it, however I still need this problem fixed ASAP because I need space on my computer to do stuff in general.

Epoch

Temp files are always safe, unless you save your docs in c:\windows\temp or C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Temp of course. XD Take a look in there...

Okay so I found another thread and downloaded this program, which is actually pretty amazing because you can "visually" see how much each programs are taking up of the data. I was correct in that the installation process was unpacking a bunch of data, and I continued to delete all of those temporary files.

slurp812 said:

Temp files are always safe, unless you save your docs in c:\windows\temp or C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Temp of course. XD Take a look in there...

Click to expand...

Okay so I deleted around 25 GBs of temporary unpacking data, and now my "Temporary files" is back down to a reasonable 9 GB. I am much more at ease, and will not attempt to install MATLAB until I have more time to deal with this.

Thanks for the help!

Why don't you just delete all of your temp files?

There's no pointing keeping them.