hard drive reads full when its only half full

[mrkoolheat]

the hard drive on my windows 7 laptop reads full when I know its not trying everything to free up the 250 gb it sucked up somehow and am out of ideas and options

 

[phil22]

The space may be being used by System Restore Points which are hidden.

 

[Michael789]

You can try CCleaner to help clean your drive:
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download

 

[Hawkeye22]

Use "disk cleanup" to delete all but the last restore point. Also, if you don't use hibernation, turn it off and it will delete the hidden hiberfil.sys file. You can also use windirstat to help locate large file.

http://windirstat.info