How can I know where my HD space went?

I recently reformated and reinstalled vista 64 on my Area 51 M15x.

my main C: drive is a 120gb solid state drive.

My problem is that after installing every driver, open office, thunderbird, firefox etc. (basicaly the basics...) and two games I am left with 64gb of free space.

I do not understand, my Program files folder is about 17gb big and my windows folder is about 7gb big, another folder is about 3gb big and that is about it. I checked and rechecked and all I can come up with is about 27gb of used space yet my machine says I am using nearly 60gb.

I already deleted the hybernation file with the disk clean up.

Any ideas? I was about to do a "Wipe" with active kill disk, it completly wipes out all sectors of unused or empty data in a hard drive, I hope it helps

 

Check the following:
1. Recycle Bin settings
2. Windows Backup settings (% of drive)
3. Check your %TEMP% folder. Delete anything out of there.
4. Check your browser cache, delete stuff out of there
5. Find some disk space reporting software to find out what else is being used up

Vista is just a big 'ol hard drive hog. Windows 7 is a little better but my HD space just keeps disappearing. I'm gonna miss XP.

 

System Restore is taking the rest of the space, disable it.

 

AH, forgot about that, just turned it off and I got back about 15gb back, which is great but I still have around 10 gb or so of unaccounted space, I can't find any of that anywhere.

LaptopFTW you told me to check the temp folder, do you mean the windows temp? That one is pretty much empty.

I know vista is a hog, I dont mind it taking up that much space, I just hate the fact that I dont know where 15gb of that space has gone.

What program can you recomend me that specifies how the space is being used?

 

Respawn taking some of the space?
Use Acronis

 

You need to disable or re-assign how much space Shadowcopy uses. A quick search on google will show you the command line entries you need to make.

 

Konig, I don't have a respawn partition, already deleted that.

Shadowcopy?..

 

Here are 2 great programs for "re-claiming" your space:

1. WinDirStat 1.1.2
2. Scanner 2.10

They give you a visual presentation of your hard drive space and how much space your programs are using.