My New Hard Drive is Disappearing!!!

[andicap]

My new HP laptop came with 160 GB of storage. Had two partitions with "140 GB" on one drive which was really about 116 with all the programs loaded, bs, etc.

So why in world in just about 10 days do I have just 102 GB left on that drive? No way have I downloaded THAT much stuff or even copied that much stuff off my other PC.

What's going on?

[Dave Schwartz]

1. You surf the web looking for pictures or videos.
2. Your settings do not clear out your internet cache after each use.

These files are still hidden on your computer in a temp folder for your browser.


http://www.horsestreet.com/BBSImages/IECache01.JPG

http://www.horsestreet.com/BBSImages/IECache02.JPG

[GameTheory]

My new HP laptop came with 160 GB of storage. Had two partitions with "140 GB" on one drive which was really about 116 with all the programs loaded, bs, etc.

So why in world in just about 10 days do I have just 102 GB left on that drive? No way have I downloaded THAT much stuff or even copied that much stuff off my other PC.

What's going on?So you're down from 116 to 102? That's not so much. You've probably got a paging file (virtual memory) and maybe a hibernation file -- that's probably 4.0 GB or more right there. You're probably also using Vista on the new laptop -- it is a hog in every sense. But I wouldn't expect it to keep dropping rapidly once it is "broken in" a little...

[andicap]

Hmm, I never ever could understand how the paging files/virtual memory thing worked, but that could be it.

Dave, I dump the temp internet files all the time.

[KYJACK]

If still no luck, you can try:

1. Using 'Windows Explorer' or 'My Computer' programs - Check the properties of folders shown in the root directory to see if a folder other than the 'Windows' folder is consuming a lot of memory (i.e. right-click on a folder in the tree and click on 'properties' to look for large memory usage by the folder. Also in the 'View' menu, make sure that 'Details' is checked, so you can see how large the individual files in the right pane are)

and/or

[ ] Use the 'Search' utility to look for:
1. Recently modified/added files and folders
or
2. Large size files
Jack

[njcurveball]

How bout you simply do a search on files modified in the last week and sort them by size to see if there are any large ones.


OK, what he said above! (sorry didn't read that until now).

[skate]

with Vista (?) you might not need 'heavy security'.

[rrbauer]

System restore files. A set is made everytime that you shutdown.