So there’s this lady, Ms. Jill, that works down on the first floor of Grace King. She pretty rarely calls us with computer issues, but she still isn’t particularly technology proficient (I don’t mean she’s computer illiterate; I just mean that when something goes wrong, she calls us to fix it, whereas the more technology proficient people try to fix it themselves first). Now, I told you this because it’s important at the end of this story.
A couple of weeks ago, Ms. Jill called our help desk with a problem of some sort, and Mikrish went to look at it. When he came back, he said her computer was out of disk space and he cleared some up but we’d need to give her a bigger hard drive or ghost it or something. Well, she uses her computer all day long so it would need to be done after hours, which is a problem because no one works past 4:30 or 5 usually. Of course, that means it didn’t get done.
Well, yesterday she called again with the same problem. Samantha went down and looked at it and ran a virus scan, hoping it might be a virus, and that cleared some crap off of it, but it still had like 2% free disk space. So I was totally confused, because Ms. Jill only has programs on that computer that she uses for work and not much else, and that shouldn’t even take up half of the hard drive, much less all of it.
Not knowing what else to do, I downloaded SpaceMonger (a program that graphically shows you what is taking up disk space) and scanned her C: drive, and at the end of the scan, it said it couldn’t scan one folder and that 70% of the disk was left unscanned because of that. “One folder has 26 gigs of crap in it?” But what? Like I said, there’s nothing on this computer.
So I looked at what folder it couldn’t scan, and it was the System Volume Information folder. Now, if you know Windows, you know this folder is hidden pretty well and it shouldn’t be 26 gigabytes. It’s not only a hidden file, but you have to set the Folder Options to show important system files, which is not recommended by Windows, and Microsoft makes damn sure you know that when you select the option to show them. Anyone that didn’t know what they were doing would probably get scared and not proceed if they accidentally stumbled across this option.
Inside of the System Volume Information folder, there’s two random crap files and a folder called ‘.tmp.’ So without anywhere else to go, I went into the .tmp folder and found my problem.
Six pirated DVD’s: American Beauty, Apocalypse, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Pianist, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Fight Club.
Remember what I said about Ms. Jill, right? There’s no way she would’ve known how to get into the System Volume information folder. So my question is:
How the F**K did 26 gigabytes of pirated movies get into the System Volume Information folder???
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