Hey guys, not sure whether this is just me being paranoid but recently I got a new computer built for me, things were going sweet until I downloaded a possibly corrupt file from a torrent site =/. So far, nothing on my computer seems unaffected by it EXCEPT for the amount of data that ccleaner clears up. All that happened was that it disabled me from being able to do anything for about a minute, followed by the blue screen of death. I forced restart my computer and after booting up, there wasn't any apparent damage caused by this (programs, games ran fine). Not knowing what else to do I decided to run ccleaner and to my horror I saw roughly 250megs had cleared up. Leading up to this ordeal I ran ccleaner once a week with only about 200/300kilobytes to clear. But since this incident it seems like "stuff" just accumulates and I've been running it daily with about 70-100megs to clear each day. Most of it points to firefox cache and the windows thumbnail cache, making up for about 95% of the data. I expressed my concern to my friend who build my computer but he reassured me that it was normal and that he clears about 80megs a day himself (i dont want to portray the wrong image here, he's a good mate and wouldn't rip me off. Even offered to do a fresh install of the OS but stood strongly by the fact that nothing was wrong with clearing that much data a day).
I know it would vary between users and their applications they use, but would appreciate some perspective as to how much people generally use. Just so you get an idea of what I use my computer for, I've only been using it to play games as it is new and I haven't installed any big applications yet. At the moment I play call of duty MW2 and quakelive (runs through browser). Besides that I only use my computer to browse the internet, occasionally watching videos online etc. I can see how most of the usage would point to firefox as it is actually what I use most, but does this mean that if I don't use ccleaner all this data would continue to eat up my HD space? And why is it that after the "incident" has my firefox usage suddenly skyrocketed. I've been using my computer consistently for the same stuff prior to this with only a couple of hundred kilobytes building up over a whole week. and now there's suddenly 100 megs building up a day.
I've run AVG and spybot with nothing harmful detected. Does this sound like spyware on my computer or is this me being a complete computer noob and the amount I'm accumulating is perfectly normal. Also as a test one day I ran ccleaner in the morning and left my computer on all day until I came back from work. I ran ccleaner again and about 50megs of sh*t had built up with no activity on my computer.
Input would be greatly appreciated. Would just like to know whether this is normal or I should have a fresh install of windows 7 (which wouldn't be such a loss as I haven't installed much on my computer).
Thanks in advance! sorry for the long post.
cheers
