Anomalous program size

[Comandante]

Why is windows reporting my thunderbird to be of 21GB size? Is this some kind of glitch or could there really be that many emails in it?? (Perhaps something else in the same folder or??) I recently reinstalled it on new formatted partition.

[insane_alien]

nah, windows just does a crappy job of estimating it. i had firefox taking up more drivespace than i had at the time. (Add or Remove Programs said 3000GB, i had 40GB)

[Ndi]

That's because Windows doesn't count (unless cornered), it uses component estimates. If correctly declared and used, it gives a good estimate. If poorly used, it gives a poor estimate.

 

An OS can't do a "crappy job" at something it does several times right. No computer results in anything else than 2 if you do a 1+1. It estimated right on other programs, so the logical deduction here is that it's this program that's at fault, not the counter. At the risk of being an obnoxious fanboy, "Windows sucks" is not the answer to all issues.

 

Thunderbird has an installation size of roughly 20-25 MB so someone obviously mis-declared the installed size. If you are bothered by it, open Regedit, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall, then search for Mozilla Thunderbird. You'll see a binary value called EstimatedSize, set by the installer. It should be what you are looking for. You can modify that. (Note that if such a value is missing Windows tries to estimate via a less-than-adequate algorithm - but I doubt that's your problem).

 

Not sure about 1.5, but in 1.0.something I used to have Thunderbird didn't adhere to Microsoft's standards not did they look like they had a thorough understanding of how things tick. Someone must have declared that size in bytes, failing to RTFM. If the value would have been in bytes 4G would be an issue today (value is binary not DWORD so its theoretical limit is quite higher).

 

Additional info here.

 

The value might have been set by an installer program, such as MSI or InstallShield, both of which try to guess size but also accept manual input from programs that plan on deploying large files after installation that are not in the kit. It's still a RTFM in my opinion.

[Comandante]

Thanks for responses.

 

I didn't find that value called "EstimatedSize" in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\Mozilla Thunderbird (1.5.0.12)

 

Another thing; I have a drive (F:) that I wanted to use as boot only, it's 10gb NTFS. I have winxp installed on it and that's the one I'm running from now. Almost all programs I install on another partition, 60gb one so the F: one is pretty clean, however, something has taken up almost all 10gb of space and I can't even determine what it is. Documents and Settings shows around 1.4gb, windows folder 1.7gb, program files 800mb and that's it, the only 3 folders I have, no hidden files, and that adds up to say around 4gb max, and yet.. my free space on that drive is 570mb... I can't even find what's taken the size?? Any ideas on that? (total size reported as 9.31gb)