Hard drive space.... vanishing!

[FishyFred]

This has happened to my laptop before: I'm running low on disk space anyway - roughly 1 free gigabyte of space - and over the course of several weeks, it will gradually whither away to nothing. Even after I do Disk Cleanup and delete the cache from my web browsers and uninstall some old game demos, it's still hovering around 300 megabytes of free space. But it keeps... coming... down. And now I'm around 120 and it's fluctuating. Sometimes up, almost always down. When I started typing this post, I had 119 megabytes of free space. Now I have 106.

I've been told when this happened in the past that my virtual memory was eating my hard drive's space like crazy, but before I did anything to change it, the problem just vanished and suddenly I had 2 gigabytes of free space. Any ideas?

If you need specs, let me know and I'll post them.

EDIT: Now I have 589 megabytes of free space. Then I opened up this message to edit it and I jumped down to 539. Now I have 519. Now I have 512. Now I have 504. IT NEVER ENDS!

 

[dagger]

Probably software related. Some program may be keeping some kind of log or building something without deleting old entries and thus continuously eating up space.

I had this problem with PeerGuardian 2 (a protowall) quite a while ago. Had to alter settings and delete a 38gb big IP address log.

 

[FishyFred]

I'm sure it's a software issue, but I don't know what I could be running that does this.

Maybe Spybot or AdAware? Symantec antivirus?

One other possibility: Cisco Clean Access Agent. I need to run that program to access my school's network.

 

[pbrigido]

I'm with dagger on this one. I would do a file search for any file over 1GB in size. I had a temp folder that was created by some software that I was using a while back. The only temp file that was in there was at least 20GB. Windows disk cleanup doesn't know to look in other temp locations software creates.

 

[kg4icg]

delete your old system restore points beyond 1 week. basically every time you boot system restore is taking more drive space.

 

[dagger]

delete your old system restore points beyond 1 week. basically every time you boot system restore is taking more drive space.

It's not supposed to make a restore point on every boot, only when system settings are changed. While deleting old restore points gives you space, it's not the source of the problem. Whatever's eating up space will still do the same.

 

[FishyFred]

I just cut the space allocated to System Restore in half and it hasn't changed my available hard drive space at all. I searched my hard drive for files over 1 gigabyte and all I found were some short films I made for my student TV station.

 

[StevieD]

Hidden file.

Even some simple Goofy stuff (like Adobe Reader) will keep temp files hidden away with names other than temp. Once the file is corrupted it will continue to grow.

Things like Spybot or AdAware, Symantec antivirus etc that have constant updates will have similar problems BUT they usually clear themselves out when they get the next update.

Rather than searching for the specific file, start recording the size of the folders (ie Windows is 20GB, Programs is 90GB) and then work your way into the size of subfolders.

I bet you find a sub or sub-sub folder that is "empty" or only contains a few minor size files but the folder properties will say it is huge in size. Your hidden cancer is in that folder.

 

[kg4icg]

To prove my point I cleared out 12 gig because of system restore. Just because you decreases the size doesn't mean you deleted the obsolete files.
By the way how big is your hard drive, you don't say anywhere in the post.

 

[venkat karthik]

don't worry man
first do these things

enable hidden files and folders
go to (if windows xp is in c drive) c:\Documents and Settings\<user name = your user name>\Local Settings\temp

delete all of the things in this folder
some files cannot be deleted because they are being used by some of the programs at that time

similarly do with c:\Windows\temp


now the next and the important step
removing the system restore
system restore is the thing which keeps the deleted files on hard drive not over written by newer files so that you can reach to the same point (status like files,folders,installed things...) when you have a problem in the future

to remove the system restore
right click my computer and then click properties

in the properties window you can see the system restore tab
go to the tab and check the turn off system restore on all drives
press apply
at this time the system may not be responding and strucking for few time(may be even up to five minutes)
the strucking is due to hard drive busy operations
be patient during this step
after sometime the task is complete and you have made the thing of freeing up a lot of disk space without losing any of your current files
just restart and you will see the difference

 

[SomeJoe7777]

Try WinDirStat. This program will scan your hard drive and give you a graphical representation of all files and folders. It makes it really easy to see what files are using the most space.

 

[gamerk316]

Download and run CCCleaner. It kills everything!

Make sure that the checkmark for the file that saves your desktop icons positions is unchecked though...I hate when my desktop gets messed up....

 

[lotussama]

Here's a second recommendation for WinDirStat. It's a fantastic program.

 

[raj_86]

Is it a big problem if free space is fluctuating time and again............pls help me i have no idea about system.........i also face the problem,... can i rectify it within 1 month