I bought Elise a HP DV1040 laptop for Christmas last year. It’s been a great computer (better, faster, cheaper than my iBook) and has been the only reason I haven’t ‘switched’ Elise to Apple (well, she has her own reasons as well).
So the HP has a 60GB drive. I’ve kept her computer absolutely pristine; I removed hid Internet Explorer and removed Outlook Express. I installed Firefox and Thunderbird for her browser and e-mail client respectively. I wiped out the trial version of Office XP and installed OpenOffice. I use Norton SystemWorks, Microsoft’s AntiSpyware, Spybot Search & Destroy and Ad-Aware.
Clean machine.
Her laptop came grinding to a halt. I checked the C: drive to find out that she had something like 30MB of space left. I had a handful of mp3’s on her machine as well as a few photo albums – but nothing that would eat up her entire hard drive.
I got to thinking… I use her computer to copy DVDs (not those that are rented from Blockbuster, of course ;-)). I use 1ClickDVDCopy. I knew there had to be some sort of Temp file that was using a significant amount of drive space.
To spare you the boring details, I downloaded TreeSize Professional and quickly found a 49GB .VOB file that I didn’t need. Tracked down the file, deleted it… *poof*
Hint: search [F3] for “*.VOB” (without quotes)
It was almost as relieving as excavating a breath-inhibiting booger.
Jolly Good Show.
That was very interesting to a technophobe like me but what is a .VOB file?