Honest Doc I'm not crazy, but that little dude that lives inside my head..he's wacked

[OuTpaTienT]

I did one of my bi-annual virus scans last night. Since I don't routinely run any active anti-virus programs I like to at least scan all files on my system once or twice a year just for good measure.

As usual, no virus to be found. But I almost would have welcomed the distraction it would have gave me if it did find one because for some quirky reason I just happened to glance at the number of files scanned and watched as the number increased for a few seconds. It was still on my C:\ drive and at about 30,000 files. I guess at one time in the past I had a C:\ drive with approximately 40,000 files on it. And for no apparent reason my mind chose to retain this figure permanently. So forever more I'll probably always think my C:\ should have about 40,000 files on it, even twenty years from now when we don't even have C:\ drives anymore. So you can imagine my concern when it just keeps counting right on past the 40g limit. I'm starting to get a little antsy watching, expecting it to finish the files on my C:\ drive any second and move on to D:\.

But it doesn't. It keeps counting files on C:\. Now over 50,000

Damn it. Now I'm obsessed. I can't turn my attention back to watching TV or anything. I must keep watching until I know how many files I have on my C:\ drive. So I keep watching.

And it keeps counting. 60,000 Geeez. Come' on already.

70,000 What?! Where the hell are all these files anyways. That's nutz.

Still counting. 80,000 This is getting ridiculous.

Count, count, count. 90,000 Nothing to do but chuckle and shake my head. This is past ridiculous, this is stupid. But the count stops for no man...

100,000 Alright!!!! Hold it! You mean you're trying to tell me I have over one hundred THOUSAND files on my C:\ drive alone? That's just stupidly, ridiculously, incredibly, unbelievably ...uh,...really?

No, not really. Because now we're up to 110,000 WTF? I'm starting to hear Twilight Zone music echo in my head. I'm obsessed and fixated on watching this until it starts on the D:\ drive...but it's never gonna start on the D:\ drive is it? ... Is it?!?! Damn it don't you see him? Don't you people see him out there on the wing? He's trying to destroy the engine!!! We're all gonna die! He's gonna crash the plane! ...Wait. I have a small handgun. I can probably hit him if I fire right through the window. ...arrhgmph...hey, what are you people doing? Get off me? I'm trying to save us!

""DING!"" Ladies and gentlemen the captain has requested you all take your seats. The commotion is over. Your C:\ drive, which btw is only 12GB in size, contains exactly 116,328 files. That's a lot of files. Practically on the edge of what is physically possible according to our laws of physics (of course you must also take into account quantum theory of file tribbles...that's the trouble with 'em).

Yep. It's downright strange, and a skosh embarrassing some of the mindless crap one types as he's waiting for the rare virus-scan to finish up so he can start using the gosh darned computer again!!!

Finally. Done. All that and not one virus. Wasted time. All that work looking for them and they're not even there. Hrrrumph. But I did learn something. I leaned that my C:\ drive is a black hole for countless files everywhere. You ever lose a file? Or make an unneeded copy of a file? I betcha it's on my C:\ drive.

btw, just fyi, I have a total number of files at 230,251 over approx 40GB of HD space. And most of those file are on my 12GB C:\ drive. [sigh] I gotta do something 'bout that.

Prolly just temp files in the cache, many of 0KB size.

No sense getting bent over it.

LOL! I can't say I remember exactly how many files are on my drives, but I admit I try to read filenames as they whiz by on an AV or Ad-Aware scan .... I'll actually write down some of those I catch and look them up later to see what they are.

You must like to live dangerously, OuT, without AV-ware

I used be hypnotized while watching Win98 defrag, too. Aren't we nuts? Don't answer that - it was a rhetorical question

Don't answer that - it was a rhetorical question

Socal- I know AD-ware but what's AV?

PS: I used to watch defrag on Norton Speedisk 'cause it had lots of colors and played music. Like watching paint dry.

AV - acronym | abbrev. for Anti-Virus

Paint doesn't move when it dries.. hehe

[vass0922]

LOL OuT you may want to investigate further

Hell even with my excessively obese (trying to be PC here!) applications like Visual Studio.NET and Visual studio 6 (yes I use both) I only got up to about 30k files NOOOO clue how you got up to > 100k LOL
I'm HOPING that's cache files hahah

[Redwolf]

Clear out your temporary intenet files and the temp cache folders. You'd be amazed at the amount of files there. BTW, what antivirus do you use out?

[Brainchild]

I don't sit in the chair and watch a scan or defrag, I sit on the couch

Is it something subliminal, written into the OS code? "watch the rolling filenames you boring ****...lol

whew! I thought it was just me, glad ya'll cleared that up

BC

[Detritus]

I used be hypnotized while watching Win98 defrag, too. Aren't we nuts? Don't answer that - it was a rhetorical question

Yes we are... a too can get hypnotized watching the disk defrag with the details turned on. weird. When I start a defrag I immediately go to another room so I don't get stuck watching it.

But speaking of caches and stuff, it's always a good idea to clean out these temp files and other junk before cloning your drive. Even the Page/Swap file should be deleted or the image file becomes unnecessarily bloated.

I found CleanSweep to be pretty thorough.