Down in the UserDumps

It's unusual to encounter a truly "wow!" experience with operating systems as old as Windows XP. But XP still surprises me on occasion. Maybe this XP peculiarity will be new to you as well.

My Jan. 8, 2009 WindowsSecrets, column, "On the trail of mysterious missing disk space," discussed a reader's problem with disk space that was decreasing with no obvious cause. The answer I gave was complete as far as it went, but this recent eye-opening moment made me realize I may have missed something major.

I came across it quite by accident at a family gathering. My brother asked me to check out an XP system he maintains. Like the system discussed a few issues back, this one was losing tons of disk space. My brother, an able tech guy, knew where the problem was: each day, the system would generate hundreds and hundreds of megabytes in "dump" files! Each day!

I had never seen anything quite like that. Worse, standard cleanup tools (some of which have specific settings to clean up dump files) didn't work.

We tracked down the source of the trouble, and eventually were able to root out the dump files using a very old-school technique. We were even able to automate the cleanup, to avoid future hassles.

It's all explained in this week's column at Windows Secrets.

My other topics this week:

ReadyBoost is one of the odder features built into Vista. It's very cool tech and it sounds great at first. Microsoft says:

"You can use nonvolatile flash memory, such as that on a universal serial bus (USB) flash drive, to improve performance without having to add additional memory 'under the hood.' The flash memory device serves as an additional memory cache, that is, memory that the computer can access much more quickly than it can access data on the hard drive. Windows ReadyBoost relies on the intelligent memory management of Windows SuperFetch and can significantly improve system responsiveness."

Wow, that sounds great, right? But, alas, it's not. In fact, I think ReadyBoost is a downright dumb idea, and I explain it in the column.

Are leftover Windows Installer files necessary? These are the files left in C:\Windows\Installer. In the column, I describe a trick I've used for years to easily determine is *any* file is really needed or not.

Retrieve a lost product key for Windows XP. I describe several totally legitimate, 100% legal ways of restoring lost product keys so you can reinmstall Windows or other software.

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http://windowssecrets.com/

Thanks for checking it out!