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Hard drive memory being mysteriously swallowed up

Tags:
  • Memory
  • Computers
  • Hard Drives
Last response: in Systems
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October 14, 2014 2:50:59 PM

My computer's been acting strangely recently; it seems even slower then it usually is, it has trouble connecting to the internet, and it's started to freeze and crash on a regular basis over the last week. More to the point, I just noticed that my hard drive space is rapidly shrinking. Thinking back on it, it's been declining over the last month or two, but I'd installed some graphics programs recently and thought maybe that had something to do with it. Today, however, when I checked my HD I saw that the free space had shrunk from around 40 GB to 5 GB in about a week, so now I'm almost certain shenanigans are afoot. I'm not sure if my shrinking HD space has to do with my computer crashing, but I have my suspicions.

I have a HP dv6 laptop with windows 7 64 bit. I'm no expert on hardware, but according to the system information page my (internal) hard drive is a NTSF local fixed disk. If you want to know more, you'll probably have to instruct me on how to find that information for you.

The main thing I want to do right now is verify where, exactly, all this new data is located, or where it's coming from. How can I do that? Is it even possible? For instance, I noticed there are two backups of my HD from within the last week (I checked them when they were mentioned as a possible source of extra data, but there's only two backups and they're both recent) and wanted to check the backup size to compare the difference, but I can't figure out how to do that.

This problem seems to be getting worse by the day, and since this is my only computer and only school computer, I'd really rather not have to give it up to the shop for a week or more. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated--the timelier, the better.

Thanks in advance!

More about : hard drive memory mysteriously swallowed

October 15, 2014 4:15:22 AM

Hi there Animyr,

First of all, I would advise you to run an antivirus check. Some viruses can cause this hard drive filling up.
Are you sure that those graphics programs are not updating automatically somehow?
If you are using Windows image tool, you can just keep only one image. You can check this out: http://www.sevenforums.com/backup-restore/215082-backup...

Hope this will help,
D_Know_WD
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