Hardware Somethings taking up to much space

[Stevodoran]

hello all

i have used this laptop for 2 years and when i got it it had 55gb frre on hard drive c (it was 160gb in total including d) and one day i just deleted every thing because it was getting realy full (but not everything) and then it still took 20 gb so whats goin on i restored it all to normal

 

[garyw]

Start -> Search -> Files & Folders -> Tick Size -> at least 10000 = Will search for files larger than 10mb

Should help you find what's eating space unless it's something odd with small files and allocation units.

 

[Stevodoran]

ok ill try this

 

[silent_protagonist]

http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/index.html

Great tool for finding large files and cleaning out your hard drive. Displays the results graphically and uses a pretty efficient search algorithm (also looks really cool doing it).

 

[N_Molson]

Beware for the numerous (and often hidden) Windows (any versions !) temp directories... Sometimes you can have thousands of small files that squat your disk space...

 

[River Crab]

Yes, it's also a good practice to set your browser, and other stuff, to clear their temp folders periodically or when closed. Also you might want to empty your recycle bin/trash, or set Windows to just delete stuff instead of recycling it.
SpaceSniffer looks awesome though, might as well try it since it's free.

 

[orb]

I use CCleaner, which cleans on every login the temp folders of files with modification date older than 2 days, and it can clean Internet browsers' cache, cookies, history, Windows restore points, and other programs cache or temporary data too, and also registry from no longer used entries, and it's free of course.

 

[Fizyk]

I had the same problem recently - a few tens of GBs mysteriously disappeared. It turned out that it was system restore data that was using this space. There is an option somewhere to clear all restore points except the last one - it will probably free all lost GBs.

 

[Keatah]

I like this -- http://windirstat.info/

And i second the use of CCLEANER. And WIPE too.

Also, a severely fragmented drive will suck up some space, as will a drive with unaccounted-for files, in that case use ULTIMATE DEFRAG and CHKDSK.


Please let us know what you find!!

 

[Lucy]

Installing more programs to clear disk space is counterintuitive. For me, most of my drive space is taken with static files - my music collection, all now digitised, weighs in around 60GB (It took up a lot of physical space on CD, too...), and game DVD backups cost around another 100~200 GB all told. (Love double-layer 15GB DVDs for that).

Hard drives are inexpensive now, really. The drives in my machine add up to 2TB, though I only use two of them for actual storage (RAID configuration with data striping for backups, leaves me with about 750 GB of addressable space, of which I hover in around 500GB.

Space micromanagement is therefore not really an issue for me, those days of squeezing megabytes out of tiny storage devices are long gone personally. However, what I find does help is to clean up all the scrap files I download around once a month, as well as temporary files and the like, web browser caches can get pretty large if you stream a lot of video and don't reboot often. Windows' bundled programs handle that fine, personally, and I've never felt the need to add in more programs to my system to manage hard drive space usage.

In conclusion, if you've got a lot of hard drive space, like 1/2 a terabyte (Which in the grand scheme is no longer a lot), 10GB isn't much. If not then of course it is, but you can't keep hard drive space forever - internet connections and a data-heavy policy make it all but impossible without constantly going back over and deleting everything once you're done with it. Thankfully, hard drives are so cheap now it's actually usually more efficient to just get a new one when one gets full.