Dissapearing hard disk space on vista.. what should I do?

[Quinton595]

Hey guys.. a while back i built my comp, its working fine.. except for the fact that I'm loosing hard disk space at an incredible rate..

 

 

 

I have a 500GB hard drive, minus about 11 GB for Vista. And i have about 10 things installed on it.. only 10 things. Which collectively take up only about 50GB.

 

 

 

WOW

 

Halo2

 

Spore

 

Mirrors edge

 

GIMP

 

Combat arms

 

Sims 3

 

NFSU

 

NFSU2

 

Portal

 

 

 

So i should be at around 400GB., but yet, im at 308!

 

 

 

Of a total space of 465 GB (It says 500 but it never is) - 11 - 50 should be 404GB left

 

 

 

For instance, today, i went down from 328 GB to 308, and i didn't install or do anything! That's a 20GB loss from not doing anything!

 

 

 

Each day more and more seems to be dissipating, but I don't have any viruses, since it's a new comp and I don't watch pr0n :roll:

 

 

 

I've checked with kaspersky, and with spybot S&D but.. no viruses..

 

 

 

Any ideas people?

[Sbrideau]

Do you use Fraps?

 

 

 

Or maybe that's system restore, but that would quite a lot of space taken up from system restore.

[Quinton595]

No, no fraps here..

 

 

 

EDIT!!: OK... so this is weird.. I click on the drive to check a file.. and exit back to my comp.. and it now says the hard disk has 380 gigs left.. Not 308.. And i know i didn't just read it wrong because the blue bar is also smaller..

 

 

 

Does vista have problems with gathering data from the hard disks, in order to calculate how much is left on them? Because it seems to be giving me false data..

[Errdoth]

Try a program like TreeSize to see where your disk space is going.

[Ellhound]

First off, 465GB being shown is completely normal. The reason is that hard drive manufacturers count 1GB as 1000MB, while windows counts 1GB as 1024MB.

 

 

 

Also, an often overlooked hard disk space hogger is the page file. Its hidden, so you wont see it. Depending on your settings this can take up quite alot of space.

 

 

 

You can check the page file size by doing this: (I'm using Windows 7, not vista but it should be pretty much the same)

 

Right click Computer, Properties (you'll get a popup), Advanced System Settings (another popup), select the avanced tab, and click settings by 'performance' (yet another popup), then go to advanced, and it will show you the size of your page file.

 

 

 

After that, I would go with Errdoth and use treesize to figure out what else is taking up alot of space.

[Quinton595]

Hey, thanks for that

 

 

 

I tried it, but the page file only takes up 4GB, same as the size of my RAM.

 

 

 

Oh well.. the number just reverted back to 380GB left.. i think im just getting false readings.