My HP software is a disk space hog

[General Mortars]

Hi, guys
I wonder if you could help me out here, I have a prob that´s been bugging me for ages.

My C: drive is only 20Gb, so of course I monitor the space usage very carefully.

A couple years ago I bough this HP scanner and installed its software.
I could never understand how from one second to the next I went from 8Gb free space to 4gb free space.
Not until I checked the control pannel (in the add/remove programs menu) and noticed that there was a thing called HP photo and Imaging 1.0 - scanjet 3500 series eating away 4GB of its disk space.

What is my scanner software doing with 4 whole GB and why can´t I find this voracious folder anywhere?
(is it a virtual folder?)

Help....

[lumis]

do you have hidden files and folders displayed?

have you done a scandisk (even a quick one should work) recently?

[kschang]

A lot of scanner software defaults to scanning in BMP mode. Thus, each full-page b&w scan is like 6000k in size, triple or quadruple that for color (eek!)

[guns1inger]

HP software is notorious for being way to big. Depending on what you use, you may be able to get away with as little as the twain drivers - enough for Photoshop or similar to see the scanner - and some cheaper OCR software. HP's printer drivers are also much larger than many other manufacturers.

I would start by uninstalling all of the scanjet software, then putting back just the minimal drivers, then test. Slowly add as little as possible until you get enough functionality for your needs.

[ebenton]

I have that same software on my PC, and Windows also says it occupies 4,090 MB of space. I need to look into this myself, even though I have a 250GB hard drive. Windows says that the 4,090 MB is just an estimate of its size.
If you have Windows XP, this page might have some updates that may or may not help you:
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareList?lc=en&cc=us&tool=softwareCategory&prod...dlc=en&os=228#

I have version 1 of the HP Scanjet software, and this website has version 2. I might try to upgrade to version 2 and see if it is more efficient with disk space, although I doubt that it will be.
Windows also lists this telephone number for support: 208-323-2551. It may actually be a good number you could call about this.