Whats eating the space on my hard drive?

[JohnnyChimpo]

I have a laptop with a 250GB hard drive running Windows Vista. After the operating system and other system files, there is 222 free space for me to use. There is a recovery drive taking up a further 10.5GB.

 

I notice that I am always running low on space and I have been trying to organise my stuff over the last couple of days, moving things arounds to different external hard drives and what not. As it stands, I have pretty much only my music on the laptop. That takes up 97GB. There is less than a gig in photos. I have the odd folder in My Documents, but they total about 2GB between them. So you could say other than music, I know of about 5GB (and thats an over estimation) of space that is being taken up.

 

So, 222 - 97 - 5 = 120. Out of the 120 its says that I have 45GB of free space left. Leaving 75GB unaccounted for.

 

I have deleted cookies, removed temp files, emptied the recycle bin, ran disc cleanup and the other standard things. Anyone got any suggestions on what might be taking up this space? Is this a common enough thing? I have of course tried to google it, but I keep coming across sites just trying to shill registry cleaners and what not, but I wanted to come to the great UKFF mind to seek advice before downloading and installing a variety of programs to try and clean my registry, which may not even be where the issue lies.

 

So, UKFF, whats the craic here?

[Merzbow]

TreeSize should be of help, it seems to be safe and does what you need.

[truthofsin]

Messing with the registry is asking for trouble.. a friend of mine is a microsoft certified technician and even he leaves the registry well alone.. Unless you know exactly what your doing, dont do it..

 

a 250GB HDD only has about 232GB of space in reality.. Vista installations are generally 15-20GB, then there's the recovery partition you mentioned also, plus i believe any SPs need to be taken into account, i believe SP1 adds about 1-2GB.. As im not looking at your computer i cant really give you an answer for sure, but my maths puts it at less than 222GB left over..

[Hyperion]

Try switching off System Restore to delete all the saved info but switch it straight back on after. If you've had it awhile and never done that, it'll take up plenty of space. Nowt wrong with deleting all the prefetch every now and again either, it'll rewrite any of that as and when.

[JohnnyChimpo]

Deleting System Restore points has freed up 30GB instantly. So thanks for that Hyperion.

 

Messing with the registry is asking for trouble.. a friend of mine is a microsoft certified technician and even he leaves the registry well alone.. Unless you know exactly what your doing, dont do it..

I wasnt going to actually go in and manually play around in there, I only mentioned the registry because pretty much all my google-ing of the issue led me to some shill about registry cleaners and what not, so I was looking for some recommendations on that, because it was something that I always took as a bit of a no-no myself.

[truthofsin]

Deleting System Restore points has freed up 30GB instantly. So thanks for that Hyperion.

 

Messing with the registry is asking for trouble.. a friend of mine is a microsoft certified technician and even he leaves the registry well alone.. Unless you know exactly what your doing, dont do it..

I wasnt going to actually go in and manually play around in there, I only mentioned the registry because pretty much all my google-ing of the issue led me to some shill about registry cleaners and what not, so I was looking for some recommendations on that, because it was something that I always took as a bit of a no-no myself.

 

In regards to registry cleaners id say avoid also. The majority of them cause more issues than they fix. I say majority as there are so many these days that i simply cant give a knowledgable opinion of all of them. The reality is that those programs are generally clumsy and thats not a healthy thing when messing with the registry.

 

If you want to use a program to free up space, use something like CCleaner (but deselect the registry cleaning options) which is free and will dispose of uneeded temporary files that are hogging space.

[neil]

Your registry doesn't take up much space anyway.

[neil]

Try deleting your temp files out of C:\Users\your username\AppData\Local\Temp

[JohnnyChimpo]

Thanks for that neil, freed up another 7GB or so. Nice one.

[Hyperion]

Deleting System Restore points has freed up 30GB instantly. So thanks for that Hyperion.

 

Messing with the registry is asking for trouble.. a friend of mine is a microsoft certified technician and even he leaves the registry well alone.. Unless you know exactly what your doing, dont do it..

I wasnt going to actually go in and manually play around in there, I only mentioned the registry because pretty much all my google-ing of the issue led me to some shill about registry cleaners and what not, so I was looking for some recommendations on that, because it was something that I always took as a bit of a no-no myself.

Christ thats a lot, glad it helped.

 

 

As for Cleaners, I use Piriform CCleaner daily, love it. I have all the registry cleaner options ticked too and never have a problem, it does a great job of getting rid of shite, you can if you want to via a pop up option, back up your registry before removing anything with it if you so wish, I've never bothered like.

 

Piriform Defraggler is also great as you can defrag individual files, no spending hours with a shit one that makes more mess than there previously was. Just defrag here and there when you get time to.

[JohnnyChimpo]

Thanks for the recommendations, I also located another 9.11GB of space being taken up in the winsxs folder, which is apparently a folder that stores multiple copies of .dll files in order to help Windows through compatibility issues and what not. I've been told not to delete anything from there though - which I dont mind, as the issue wasnt so much me wanting to free the space, as just wanted to know where the space was gone. Not knowing what was being used for what was starting to do my head in. All in all, I've freed up about 45GB and located another 10GB in the last 24 hours, leaving 20GB unaccounted for still, but I would still call that a result.

 

Going to try some of those Piriform CCleaners and see if I can get a little more. If anyone else has any more suggestions, feel free to add them, but other that that, thanks to anyone who helped out. Case closed.