McAfee's a Pack Rat

Working for a health department, we don't always have the latest and greatest technology. Oftentimes we have computers that have been working here longer than our staff. We still employ a handful of Compaq Deskpros running Win2K with 256MB of RAM and 10GB hard drives. As long as you don't do anything else with them besides your job, they're fine.

So I get a call from one of the poor staff that got assigned one of these Deskpros and she was telling me that our home health software wouldn't let her on. I ran back there and looked at the error message.
Oh, okay, that's all?

Seriously, that error message makes no sense. But the very fact that I took a screenshot of it led me to discover what caused it - no hard drive space.

Yeah, the hard drives are only 10GB, so that's no surprise. I go in to the user profiles and start deleting a few 100MB here and there...but it still isn't taking a dent out of the fact that the whole hard drive is stuffed. So I run some Sequoia View to see what's killing the hard drive.


What the...that huge yellow box is...McAfee?

I head over to the folder containing all that crap and check.


Yep, old McAfee DAT files are taking up nearly 4GB of the 10GB hard drive. A quick delete of this folder and everything is back to normal. Guess this is what happens when you use a computer with McAfee for 10 years without wiping it. I don't know it's normal for McAfee to hoard all it's old DAT files, but that seems like bad design to me.