Question Why are there still so many files?

[bimjobs]

I have an old Gateway I purchased back in 2012 that I used primarily for torrenting and downloading movies, music, etc. and I deleted all the partitions on it. I put Windows 10 onto it via free upload thru USB key (I believe it used to be Windows 7 or Vista). It is now used only to check emails on and do the odd YouTube search.

I went to do a full scan on it and it's showing hundreds of thousands of files being checked, well over an hour into the scan. Where are all of these files coming from?? I deleted all the partitions, meaning all of the memory should have gone with it? It shouldn't take this long to do a scan, as there's almost nothing on the memory.

Can someone explain what might be going on please?

 

[USAFRet]

"full scan" with what?

You installed Win 10 on it?
That is "hundreds of thousands of files" all by itself.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Looking at my install of Windows 11

• Windows itself is taking up about 139,000 files
• The C:\Users folder is taking up another 59,000 files
• Both Program Files folder is about 20,000 files

 

[bimjobs]

"full scan" with what?

You installed Win 10 on it?
That is "hundreds of thousands of files" all by itself.

Full scan with Windows Defender. My PC still seems kind of slow, though.. It is older, like 500gb of HDD, I believe. I could be wrong, it wasn't the most expensive tower, but it also wasn't the cheapest either.

Last I looked it had scanned well over 700,000 files. The scan took over an hour and a half to complete. You don't think there could be files that weren't wiped when I did the partition delete, do you?

 

[Bob.B]

Full scan with Windows Defender. My PC still seems kind of slow, though.. It is older, like 500gb of HDD, I believe. I could be wrong, it wasn't the most expensive tower, but it also wasn't the cheapest either.

Last I looked it had scanned well over 700,000 files. The scan took over an hour and a half to complete. You don't think there could be files that weren't wiped when I did the partition delete, do you?

Run a pass of disk cleanup don't forget to click the system files button.

If you want to go a little deeper look into ccleaner.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Full scan with Windows Defender. My PC still seems kind of slow, though.. It is older, like 500gb of HDD, I believe. I could be wrong, it wasn't the most expensive tower, but it also wasn't the cheapest either.

Last I looked it had scanned well over 700,000 files. The scan took over an hour and a half to complete. You don't think there could be files that weren't wiped when I did the partition delete, do you?

If you really want to figure out where all these files are coming from, use WinDirStat. Run it as an Administrator.

Otherwise when you reformat the drive, the files become inaccessible. That is, the record that tells the OS where the files are got erased. It's effectively as good as erasing the file. In fact, erasing doesn't actually erase anything, it just marks the space as available for future use. While yes, the data may still be there, it can't actually do anything unless you tried to recover it.