File size ntuser dat

Well, that's your user hive in the registry. Getting rid of it would definitely not be a sensible move.

Are you on a network or is it a standalone machine? 18GB is big, but by no means the biggest that I have heard about. It all depends upon what you have installed on the machine. It might be worth trying CCleaner to see if that reduces the size at all.

There is no way your ntuser.dat should be 18 gig. Either the OS is reporting the size wrong or there are serious issues.

I have about 20 pretty big software packages installed, and my ntuser.dat is a bit over 7 MB, less than 1/2,000 of what you have.

You would want to create a new user for you to use, you can backup all of your custom settings and you won't loose any intalled software since you are just creating a new user and not re-building your whole system.

Then run a anti-virus and anti-spyware scan, although I think your file is just corrupt and it's not a virus that is causing this.

Thanks for something else I can try. I edited the registry yesterday and even though I deleted over 2Gb of file size in Windows update trash, my free space still says only 253MB.

Since I now can''t defrag or even update AVG (was able to update yesterday and ran a scan), I didn't know what else to do. I'm installing programs onto another laptop so I can continue work.

Unfortunately, last night upon shutdown, Windows auto update installed 11 updates again. So I expect I will have even less free space now. I haven't turned it on yet today as I expect this could be time consuming.

Thanks again for this suggestion.

What are you changing in the registry and how does that have anything to do with Windows update files, and why do you think that the files you are removing are trash? What files are you deleting?

I think you are doing things you should not be doing with the computer.

If you are running out of space, make sure your Recycle Bin is empty, Go into I.E. settings and change the temp file size to like 100mb, it's probably set to something like 1gig. Right click on the Recycle Bin and change the size it saves for itself to something smaller from default, 5% or even lower should be good unless you like to delete lots of files for some reason. Go to C:\Windows\Temp, delete all the files from there. Any programs you downloaded and installed can be deleted. If they are already installed, why keep the setup file for it. Just make sure you only delete the installer, not the program directory.

The biggest issue is your gigantic profile, that file should not be anywhere near 18gig. Create a new user for yourself, copy over your Favorites, Desktop, etc.. and delete the old profile. You should back it up to an external drive just in case though before you delete.