So last week we got a call from one of our retail store customers, said his hard drive was full. Sure enough, we had a technician make a visit and the hard drive was full, and the system would not operate. Our tech did a great job cleaning up the system, thinking the typical system that had never been cleaned up was what he was dealing with. He Deleted 35GB! There was a ton of temp files and downloaded items that were no longer needed. Keep in mind, this hard drive was only 80GB total, so cleaning it up and freeing up almost 50% of the space looked like it would be smooth sailing from there. So the next day, I get a call from the customer again, and the drive is full again! Needless to say, I’m thinking some weird new virus or malware infection that is eating up all the free space.

I sent out a technician again, and he freed up about 3GB of space – not much, but enough to make the system usable. After searching for really big files and getting impatient with the slow search, the tech began checking each folder on the C: drive, and found the ProgramData folder was taking up about 40GB, or half of the entire hard drive. That folder is normally hidden, and the normal user doesn’t know how to make it visible. Drilling down into the sub-folders in there, he found one folder was nearly all of it – a folder that was created by the Webroot software, and had two files that were databases. One was 14GB and the other was 27GB. Bingo! Why a supposed “Antivirus” program would take up such as enormous amount of space in two files is beyond me. But I’ve had other issues with Webroot before – it’s not good protection, and it slows your computer down a ton! I immediately recommended to the customer that we remove it, and replace that protection with ESET NOD32 Antivirus. After doing that, we had nearly 50% free space, and things are going perfectly fine for the past week for this customer.

As a side note – please stop shopping at Best Buy for computers, software, etc.! Great place to go look and feel, then go buy someplace else. They push whatever crap they can make the most money on. They don’t care about what actually works, and what is in the best interest of their customers! Best Buy is the only place I’ve seen pushing Webroot, and they’ve been doing it for years. Webroot is like paying for someone to install a virus on your computer. Avoid it and Best Buy at all costs!