Help! Dell Mini 9 losing disk space!

I have a Dell Mini 9, and it is steadily and repeatedly losing what little disk space I have. I ran AVG and panda security and got nothing. I've done disk cleanup and cleared the history, cache, cookies, and restore points. It's STILL losing space. It'll go up when I restart but then immediately start dropping. There are no games or music or movies on this thing. I even took all my text files out. The only programs that were added after I got it were office, firefox, and avg. Please help!!

oh, and i'm running xp home edition

 

Losing space as in total drive capacity or free space? How much and at what rate? Some log files can grow quite large.

 

Yeah, losing disk space as in your total capacity or free space? And when do you notice it?

Is it everytime you boot up or every few days or after a week that you notice?

Because there could be potentially a thousand reasons for this.

 

And how much? If it's in the KB, or even a few MB I wouldn't worry. Maybe if you're dropping GB at a time.

Also, like everyone else says, are you losing free space (used space goes up, free space goes down, total stays the same), or losing capacity (used space stays the same, but free space/total goes down)?

 

it's available disk space, as in i keep getting the low disk space warning and there isn't enough space to run defrag. two days ago i had nearly a gig of free space, now there's less than 200 mb...it hasn't gone back up above 300 mb.

 

I assume that your mini9 with 8g SSD was bought more than a year ago, and you have not done any disc clean up since then? Assuming that you're using XP SP3, go to:-
start-accessories-system tools-disc clean up. Click the part where it calculates the deletable size of the system restore and see whether it helps on freeing more space of your hdd.

After you're done with this, defrag the drive, see how much you gain.

 

Oops... i missed that part. Maybe you can try using CCleaner to clear off other issues that maybe clogging your system?

 

It could be system restore. That's the only feature that I know of that is turned on by default and will eat up that kind of space.

if you hit Win + BREAK, you can bring up the system properties and lower the system restore space allocated.

The suck part is system restore will constantly create restore points til you get the low disk space message. Rather than start purging old restore points and avoid the low disk space message it will stop making restore points(??) til the user manually makes space. It will only purge older restore points if it exceeds it's maximum allotted space, which in your case is 400 MB by default. Only then will it purge the restore points, rather than also during low disk space situations.

It makes no sense in my mind....