HD is losing space every day but haven't installed anything... (1 Viewer)

[Chris Hicks]

lately my hd seems to be slowly losing space. I have run my AV and it didn't find anything. I have cleared all my internet cache. what else could it be? could it the system restore feature?

 

[Walt Williams]

I recently bought a new computer with XP and system restore gobbles up over 12GB. That could be what's happening with yours and you can decrease the amount of space reserved if you need to. Just right-click on My Computer and go to Properties, click the System Restore tab and then Settings. It's probably best to leave it where it is unless you're running out of room on your drive though.

 

[Mark Shannon]

That happend to me a while back. For me, it seemed to be a combination of SystemSuite, and System restore that was causing the problems. Mainly, space on my C drive was being eaten up rapidly (ie, everytime I hit refresh in explorer, the drive had lost 100MB). When I restarted the computer, though, the drive usage was back to it's normal amount, but woud slowly gain again.

IIRC, I ended up screwing around with some settings with both System Restore and SystemSuite.

 

[Seth--L]

How much space are we talking about each day or week?

 

[Chris Hicks]

around a gig or more.

 

[Glenn Overholt]

As you don't know where this is happening you should find out, so I'd like to offer this idea.

Open up Explorer and right click on the major directories, write down how much space they are taking up, and repeat it the next day. At least you would find out where it is not happening, (and I hope Windows is one of them - due to the large number of directories in it)!

I would also go through all of your temp directories and clear them out. Sometimes after a file is closed the temp file on it remains.

I would also crank the system restore down to zero and remove everything, and then reboot and restore it. You could get back a lot of space that way. At 1 gig (even in a week), I'd be screaming!

Glenn

 

[Ken Chan]

There's a cool free disk usage app: JDiskReport. You can easily drill down into directories. It's a Java app. If you're not sure if you have a recent-enough version of Java, you should install the current version first (you only need the "JRE", not the "SDK"). The current JRE has "Web Start", so if you click on the "Web Start Links" on that home page, it will automatically download and run that app, no muss, no fuss. It will ask for permission to access the disk -- of course you won't get far without it.

//Ken