When I uninstall a program I lose hard drive space?

[RG1610]

Hello,
I'll keep it brief. I started at 270GB of hard drive space used. I uninstall some games and now I'm at 288GB? What happened?

 

[lxgoldsmith]

that's odd, first make sure that it's space used that you're looking at.
if you use windows, do pc maintenance with ccleaner's registry cleaner, windows' disk defragmenter (not for ssd), and windows' disk cleanup

if you have an antivirus program, do a full scan. if not, download microsoft security essentials, update it, and run a full scan. full scans take longer, but they're more thorough

 

[RG1610]

that's odd, first make sure that it's space used that you're looking at.
if you use windows, do pc maintenance with ccleaner's registry cleaner, windows' disk defragmenter (not for ssd), and windows' disk cleanup

if you have an antivirus program, do a full scan. if not, download microsoft security essentials, update it, and run a full scan. full scans take longer, but they're more thorough

Did everything except registry cleaner. I have no experience with that. Amazingly the result of all this was again another increase in memory! I'm not reading it wrong? Are my files dumping some where?

 

[spdgt87501]

Its a plague!! Lol
There are two other threads with this same issue and nobody seems to have an answer.

 

[Reser]

Check you C:\Windows\System32\Config folder.

I had 20GB of spae vanish and found it in there. It was a now known Windows 8 problem to do with Nvidia drivers.

This problem got fixed yesterday in an update but you may still have to delete all the files to free the space.

check my thread here http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/298720-14-missing-20gb-drive-page-file

And the official Microsoft forum with replys from microsoft employees here - http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w8itprogeneral/thread/6efbf453-aec3-4cfc-b6e0-de9dc5e6a99c/

 

[lxgoldsmith]

physical memory is different than hard drive space, it's RAM. if your total memory has more MB or GB, it means that your system is using more of the HDD to store active files, and you will see a popup somewhere about increasing "virtual memory"