Too Many Files?

Hello all,
I just used windows defender and after the scan was finished, it scanned 1,127,605 files. This does not appear right to me.
I checked the windows files for "Old Windows" and it was not listed. So if its a problem, then it must lie somewhere else.
Your thoughts?

rejlocal22 said:

Hello all,
I just used windows defender and after the scan was finished, it scanned 1,127,605 files. This does not appear right to me.
I checked the windows files for "Old Windows" and it was not listed. So if its a problem, then it must lie somewhere else.
Your thoughts?

Click to expand...

I have just about all the MS Apps uninstalled. All my games are installed on a storage drive too.
I just ran a Bitdefender scan of just the C:\ (Windows) drive, and have Bitdefender set to skip scanning archives.
It scanned 410,000 files.

If I had let it scan my storage drive too... it would easily pass 1.5 million files.


This is an old pic, but you can see, I removed almost all the MS Apps....

Ghot said:

I have just about all the MS Apps uninstalled. All my games are installed on a storage drive too.
I just ran a Bitdefender scan of just the C:\ (Windows) drive, and have Bitdefender set to skip scanning archives.
It scanned 410,000 files.

If I had let it scan my storage drive too... it would easily pass 1.5 million files.

Click to expand...

I resemble this comment.

I have 1,160,472 files and that is excluding my fonts and images which total about 500,000

rejlocal22 said:

Hello all,
I just used windows defender and after the scan was finished, it scanned 1,127,605 files. This does not appear right to me.

Click to expand...

Have you ruled out temp files, duplicate files? Have you run a Disk Cleanup?

I have very few programs installed, but


File Infected - this was left on the disk:
file://D:\Customize\Win11\Install\Disable_Defender\windows-defender-remover-release_def_12_0_0_0_1\run.bat
Forgot about them. Deleted them.

Thank all,
I had thought I had too many files. However I will run CCleaner.

I have a 1TB C: drive.
chkdsk reports:

981313535 KB total disk space.
375309172 KB in 548782 files.
368980 KB in 157110 indexes.
1012767 KB in use by the system.
604622616 KB available on disk.

rejlocal22 said:

I just used windows defender and after the scan was finished, it scanned 1,127,605 files. This does not appear right to me.

Click to expand...

What you need to be aware of is that Defender can scan inside compressed files, and when it does so each file in the archive is included in the total of files scanned.

Just try scanning a single .zip file and you'll see what I mean.

I have three drives -- 500g NVME (boot -- 360g free), 1TB SSD (Games - 135g free), and a 4TB HDD (general storage - 2.34TB free).

According to Everything I have 754k files across all three drives.

Since you didn't list what drives and size you have, it's hard to tell if that is too many files. However, depending on how old your install is and what you've installed I don't feel that the number listed is out of the ordinary.

I made a mistake on the name of the software. It's not windows defender but "Auslogics" duplicate file finder. I just sent an email to the manufacturer asking why their software only deleted 6,672 duplicates out of 35,787. It took 3 hours and 50 minutes to do this.
Now I am running the software a second time and so far it has found over 300 duplicates. If I do not get a satisfactory answer, I may have to
look for another duplicate file finder.

STOP!!!
Be extremely careful what you are deleting in the Duplicate Files category. There are many file attached to various programs, that absolutely MUST be where they are, for all your programs to run properly.

Your problem is the junk files created by your browsers, etc. Browsers being the worse culprets!

Programs like CCleaner are not your answer either. I've never found ONE that will clean out all the junk created by games, browsers, etc.

With my intention to keep a CLEAN computer, I've written my own "Cleanup.bat" program to just get rid of the JUNK.
At the end of the run, it tells me just how many files it's removed. I try to run it at the end of each day, but sometimes I'll miss a day.
Here's a typical run:


This is NOT the most files deleted in just one 24 hr. period, but representative of what I see daily.
So carry that out to one year, and my SSD would be getting pretty full, of just JUNK! 365 x 340,682 = 124,348,930 junk files.
And how many people, right here on this forum, never clean out their Temporary Files, till they cause a problem?

My Cleanup batch file is 100% safe, because it never touches the registry or any system files. It will only delete what I've specifically told it to delete.

My "Cleanup.bat" program, (Batch File) is free to anyone who asks for it.

Happy 2024, Y'all,
TM

rejlocal22 said:

Hello all,
I just used windows defender and after the scan was finished, it scanned 1,127,605 files. This does not appear right to me.
I checked the windows files for "Old Windows" and it was not listed. So if its a problem, then it must lie somewhere else.
Your thoughts?

Click to expand...

Without knowing how your pc is setup, how many installed apps etc, we have no way of knowing if this is right or wrong but it does not look unreasonable - I have over 1 million files on my C drive. Many are hidden of course and would not be seen from a nomal directory list.

I doubt you have anything wrong.
As for duplicate files - many system files are duplicated across multiple directories - totally normal.

I see no evidence of any issues with your installation based on info you have supplied.