Harddrive Space Gone

[joel17]

Hi, i have Vista Ultimate 32 bit and when i got it i was informed that vista takes up alotta space with its restore points it creates, so i figured out how to delete the restore points and have been since that day. Today i noticed that my space keeps getting smaller and smaller, i lost 2 GB today within a few hours and didnt download or install anything new, i tried deleting the restore points which usualy after a few days of not deleting gives me around 9 GB storage space back, but this time nothing happened. Any ideas on how to stop that or whats going on?
Also i have a 160 GB harddrive currently and only around 14.5 GB left free space.. I got to looking in my programs list and it says i only have 45.3 GB of programs installed and i checkked my My Documents out and only have 9 GB in it, so that means i should have around 90-100 GB free space left on the harddrive right? Anyways i just built this PC a few months ago and its already full and i dont have nothing installed hardly as you can tell so were has all my space gone? I realize that 160GB harddrive is very small and am going to upgrade when i get the money but from what i can find i should have alot more space free then what i do.

Any replies apreciated, thanks.

 

[Zoron]

Clean out your temp folders. Another item that will take up space is your pagefile... you can curb this by setting a static size for it so that it can't grow or shrink. If you have hibernation enabled, the hibernate file will take up in hard drive space the equivilent in RAM. (IE: 2GB of RAM = 2GB hibernate file).

When you say you have 45.3GB in programs installed... are you also accounting for the space Windows takes up? Vista itself can account for 10 - 15GB of hard drive space.

The last thing is that a 160GB hard drive will NOT have 160GB of usuable space once it's formatted... it will be equal to roughly 148GB of space in Windows. This is because hard drive manufacturers state their capacity based on 1GB = 1000^3 bytes, whereas Windows calculates hard drive space based on 1GB = 1024^3 bytes. So, you lose roughly 7% of the drive's stated capacity upon formatting it.

 

[joel17]

Hey thanks for the reply. When i go to clean out my restor files it cleans my temp folders for me because its in diskcleanup. I checked my pagefile and its taking up about 2.4 GB and if hibernation takes up 2GB then thats 4.4GB that is took up onto my 45.3GB in installed programs and 9 GB in my MY Documents. I didnt allow for Windows install but i can add 15 GB for that and after you add everything up i have 73.7 GB took up outta 149 GB, so i shuold have like 75 GB free.... but its showing 14 for some reason : (. Anyways thanks for the help so far.

 

[LoneEagle]

You can download a free program that will show you how much a disk and directories are using:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/windirstat/

Let us know in case this happen to somebody else!