Disk management shows different drive capacity

[Colnago_99]

Hello,

I have an older laptop running on Windows XP with SP3. It only has a 60GB hard drive. It come's to the point that the HDD space went below 1% or just around 500MB. I bought an external drive and moved the bulk of my documents into the external drive. I deleted the files in the hard drive after the transfer and probably free up more or less 30GB of space in the HDD. The problem is WIndows still reporting that the space is still below 1%...it's not recornizing the free space in the HDD after I deleted my documents? And I could not perform a disk defrag as it needs at least 15% space, but I know i have more than that after I deleted my files. I've also empty the recycle bin and free up all the temporary and junk files. Any idea why windows behave like this or how to solve and retrieve the free up space in the HDD?

 

[WyomingKnott]

Try a free tool called WinDirStat. Be sure to set the option to show hidden space, and it will show you where space is used. Let us know what you see.

Common answers to these questions involve pagefiles, hibernate files, and system recovery points. What's unusual about your situation is that you just deleted 30 GB of files and emptied the recycle bin.

It may be time to put a bigger drive in there, anyway.

 

[Colnago_99]

Hey, thanks WyomingKnott. I've downloaded the WinDirStat and it solve my problem. I saw all the hidden junk files and read only files that windows created in this software. But the big culprit is the Recycle Bin, for some reason it didn't actually emptied the recycle bin when I execute the "empty recycle bin". No files are displayed in the recycle bin after I executed the command giving me the impression that all files in the bin were totally deleted. But when I executed WinDirStat it still reporting that over 2000 files are in the recycle bin (which are files I previously deleted)...I went back to the recycle bin to check, but nothing displayed in there. So I deleted the files again in the WinDirStat and all the junk hidden and read only txt files that the microsoft net framework created in the Windows Temp dir., which I also thought were deleted when I did the built-in clean-up utilities in Windows. All in all I've freed up 25GB. THis software utilities is GREAT!!! You really need specialized software to clean things up and not rely on the built-in utilities in Windows...they don't work sometime. Many thanks again for the help!

 

[Colnago_99]

Best answer selected by Colnago_99.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey