As someone who reviews gaming keyboards, I can confidently say that most of the driver/manager apps that come with them are terrible. They’re often slow, bloated, and trying to do way too much. But I’ve yet to encounter one that filled up my storage with 50 GB of mildly racy anime babes, as one user claims happened to their PC.
Alright, so this one is weird and interesting and goofy. A poster on a PC gaming subreddit claims that the XPG Prime app—which manages RGB lighting for the company’s RAM, coolers, and other PC hardware—filled up a Windows temp folder with 50.4 GB of repeating screenshots of generic sci-fi anime women. The how and why aren’t immediately obvious, but presumably user “red_machina” spotted the huge space filling up their SSD with junk.
Tom’s Hardware did a bit of investigating, identifying the photos as screenshots and other promotional material from XPG’s very own anime short. (I don’t recommend watching. The effort is there, but the mix of barely animated 2D images and what looks like Unity 3D animation is undeniably low-rent.) So, these aren’t just anime women, they’re PC gaming anime women. Woo. Apparently, the program downloads the images to present to the user as wallpapers each time it runs, but neglects to delete the temporary files created in the process.
But something else is going on with this particular user’s PC. Simply repeating this process and downloading the same wallpaper image files over and over again would require rebooting the PC (or at least the app) several thousand times before the duplicate files took up 50 GB.
Still, if you happen to use XPG RAM and you’ve installed the RGB manager program, maybe use a tool like SpaceSniffer to see if you can quickly clear up some room on your SSD. Unless you want thousands and thousands of wallpapers of generic anime ladies, for some reason. Note that your RAM will probably cycle in rainbow colors without a dedicated app, or you can use something like OpenRGB to manage it with something a little less branded.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer, PCWorld
Michael is a 10-year veteran of technology journalism, covering everything from Apple to ZTE. On PCWorld he's the resident keyboard nut, always using a new one for a review and building a new mechanical board or expanding his desktop "battlestation" in his off hours. Michael's previous bylines include Android Police, Digital Trends, Wired, Lifehacker, and How-To Geek, and he's covered events like CES and Mobile World Congress live. Michael lives in Pennsylvania where he's always looking forward to his next kayaking trip.