Unknown lost of space on hard drive

[jthoov]

I have an SSD that my Win7 is installed on.

I did disk clean up, deleting everything I could and even deleted any old system restores.

My Temporary Internet Folder from Internet Explorer had been set to a different hard drive than my SSD so there was nothing that can actually take space away.

I had 28.2 GB of free space.

All I did afterwards was install 1 driver and software for my new webcam. I installed the thing on my other hard drive anyway (I triple checked)

But now, no matter what I do, my SSD is showing 27.7 GB only of free space.

What the heck? Even if I did install it on there by accident (which I didn't), how the heck is a 20mb program going to take up 500mb on a hard drive.

It just doesn't make sense

I've done the whole disk clean up thing again but nothing is changing.

I'm so confused...

 

[buzznut]

I find that windows updates can take a bit of room, do you use another drive for internet downloads and such? I understand the real estate is an issue on a boot SSD, you can greatly reduce some of that space.
Completely removing system restore will help. Also the annoying UAC can give back quite a bit of space.
More ram would allow for the dismissal of the system cache. I have 4 gigs only, so I moved the cache to another hard drive as I rarely need it.

 

[nocheese]

Even though you told the installer for the webcam driver/software to go to a different drive, some of it goes to the the primary drive anyhow. Drivers for example always are located in the \WINDOWS tree (C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\Drivers for example).

 

[sminlal]

First of all, 0.5GB is not enough to loose sleep over, IMHO.

Did you check the recycle bin for every account on your system?

Are you sure your pagefile hasn't auto-grown?

And it might be worth double-checking your System Restore Points. See this article for more information: http://www.tomsguide.com/us/windows-vista-solutions,review-1179-2.html