Where is my hard disk space going???

[teknic111]

I have a solid state 80gb drive that I try to keep to a minimum. When I first built my computer (about 8 months ago), I easily had 40 gigs free. I haven't installed anything of significant size since, but my drive is slowly becoming full and I don't know why! Now I'm at the point where it's almost completely full!!!

BTW, recycle bin is empty!

Here is a screenshot of my drive info...Can anyone make any sense of this??

 

[Ijack]

I would guess that System Restore Points account for at least some of this space.

 

[teknic111]

A valid point, but at best System Restore uses a maximum of 15% of the drive. That would only be about 12 gigs. Where did the rest go?

 

[teknic111]

Also, if I were to run Disk Cleanup I would only gain 1.87GB.

 

[Deadstick50]

What OS are you on? I know Vista has a known issue with filling up hard drives!

 

[teknic111]

I'm running x64 Windows 7 sp1.

 

[Deadstick50]

OK, haven't heard of any issue similar to Vista on 7 so no go there.......maybe more small things than you realized??

 

[ko888]

Maybe you should turn on Show hidden files and folders.

Is Hibernate turned on?

How much space is allocated to your page file?

 

[Deadstick50]

Good points there!

 

[Jim_L9]

Windows update files can take quite a bit of space too.

 

[Deadstick50]

Also keep in mind, when you formatted that drive you no longer have 80GBs.

 

[teknic111]

The screenshot I posted shows all hidden files and directories. Hibernate is off and total paging file size for all drives = 6135MB.

 

[Deadstick50]

6GBs page file??? seems big to me, how much ram are you running?

 

[teknic111]

I'm running 6GB of ram.

 

[ko888]

What about disabling the hiding of protected operating system files setting?

 

[penguintech]

I would run this http://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/
I use it alot myself, it's very helpful in showing you exactly where all your stuff is stored so you can then go through and erase stuff you no longer need anymore i.e. temp files and such.

 

[Deadstick50]

Get yourself a copy of Ccleaner from download.com and have it check for extra log files and stuff you dont need.......might help

 

[das_stig]

How much space is C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution taking up, Windows Update are downloaded and stored here and sometimes don't get cleaned out, but +1 on CCLEANER.

 

[teknic111]

Disabling "hiding of protected operating system files" pretty much reveals the paging file and a 6gig hibernate file. That still leaves a lot of unaccounted space eaten up.

I downloaded and ran CCleaner and it will only clean up 2.5gigs.

C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution = 627 MB

 

[ko888]

I've used Disk Space Fan freeware disk space analysis tool for Windows utility.

 

[JackNaylorPE]

Where are you storing your user files like E-mail ? Where are your temp files being stored ?

If ya want to try an easy disk cleanup utility Steven Gould's "CleanUp" is a great tool.

 

[lucidica]

Take a look at the guide here: How To Check Folder Sizes
It reccomends using a tool such as WinDirStat to analyse exactly what is using up exactly how much space on your hard drive.
Hope that helps!

 

[omerius]

no one here even looked at your screen shot and gave you a proper answer! I have the exact same issue , did you solve it?

 

[drifter77]

One thought, are you using an iPhone or iPad? The things is, say you have a 16GB device, when its full and you make a backup on iTunes, it takes ~ 16GB on your hard disk. That could be part of your problem.

 

[omerius]

I keep a way from apple and no I dont have any device as this connected to my computer.
thanx a lot any way