Hard Drive almost Full

I have a Lenovo T61p and it has a 160gb 5400 rpm hard drive...my hard drive has only around 7gb remaining...I do not have very much stuff on my laptop at all..and i dont understand what is taking up so much space...any help would be great..thx
-Noah

 

System Restore turned on and has a large amount of drive space set aside for it? Firefox/Internet Explorer have to much set aside for the cache?

Check each folder and see where all this bloat is coming from

 

hibernate and virtual memory is a good chunk

 

And I'll bet the Temp and Temporary Internet Files folders have a few gigs worth of unnecessary stuff.

 

right click on the C:\ and do a disk cleanup, see where your GB are. You can also remove old system restore points if you do not need them. First steps I would do.

 

Yeah, you should be able to look in C:\ and tell where stuff is.

 

do as goofball mentioned,
My friends have vista on the school laptop T61's. After the first semester ended, nobody had more than 10gb of space left. I took my voodoo, connected it to the projector, and showed everyone how to disk cleanup, both the temporary files and the system restore files.
On average, the space gained back was from 30-60Gb.

If you hibernate more, your system will use a tremendous amount of harddisk space when caching it for boot up.

Just clean up these files and you should reclaim a ton of harddrive space.

K-TRON

 

Im wondering if the drive is partioned from the factory, and the C: drive would almost be full, because everything gets downloaded to it instead of the D: drive

 

Uninstall unnecessary programs, check your computer for spyware/malware etc., Run a disk cleanup along with disk defragment, delete some unneeded .dat files (ONLY IF you know what you're doing there), and try deleting old and unneeded emails as well .

 

With the way OP said he does not have much on it I am inclined to follow Jeff32 advice. I have a lot on my 160GB partitioned down to 142GB ( I know it never had 160GB) and I still have 65GB free. So OP is out of touch or malware of some kind. I am on line and do much that would create temp files and have never done a disk cleanup in a year and a half. That said do check the allocated space for restore, not more than 12%, and set limits with IE or FF. Does Recycle Bin take from? If so empty. I don't even use it. Just my thoughts.

 

Ok i did a disk clean up and deleted the old restore points and it brought me up to about 23GBs but i stll think i should have more...how do i set the allocated space for restore..what powerpack said...and what is a good limit for FF and IE?

 

R-click on My Computer and you will see a tab called System Restore. I have mine set for 2 % and that works for me. It's not dependent on FF or IE.

 

In Firefox, if you go up to the tools tab, and go to options.
Then go into the privacy tab and you will find the cache tab.
I have mine set to 50mb.

In Internet Explorer, go to tools, then internet options,
In the general tab, you will see a box outlined in blue which says temporary intenet files. Click on the settings button. It allows you to change how much space which the internet caches to your computer.
You should clear your temprorary internet files, both online and offline, and clear your history, so that the temporary internet files folder is emptied, thus retrieving disc space.

I have 1Gb of space allocated, as I primarily use internet explorer. I only use firefox when I access notebook review. For some reason IE continually crashe with notebook review up.

Hopefully this cuts down on the space used on your drive.
I would run disc cleanup again, just to make sure it cleaned up everything.

K-TRON

 

There is a program called windirstat, google it, should be first option. it maps out your hard drive usage in a big picture looking graph. Its probably the most useful hard drive tool out there. Best of all, it's free. Check it out, and tackle those huge blocks of files to see what is taking up so much space

 

Which version of Vista do you have? Some have Shadow Copy enabled, which can eat up some space.......

 

I use CCleaner every once and a while to free space on my hard drive get rid of other things. Its a great little program...plus its free!

Summary from their website:
CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster and freeing up valuable hard disk space. It also cleans traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. But the best part is that it's fast (normally taking less than a second to run) and contains NO Spyware or Adware!

Link to their website: http://www.ccleaner.com/

Also, I wonder if your hard drive has a hidden partition that the manufacturer created for restoration purposes. What's the total space Windows says you have on your hard drive?

 

If you are using Vista, check out this link:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/reduce-system-restores-disk-usage-in-vista/

Unlike Windows XP, under Vista, you must use the commandline to change how much space is allocated for System Restore. I set this to 4GB after running Vista for perhaps a week; I instantly freed up 10-12GB of hard disk space.

As others have said, open up "My Computer" and find the icon for your C: drive. Right-click it, then choose Properties. From the window that comes up click the Disk Cleanup button. This may help if you have a number of excess temporary files.

Also, limit the maximum size of your browser's cache file. Internet Explorer, for example, starts out with an arbitrary percentage of your hard disk that can be 1-2GB in size on today's large hard disks. I set mine to 100MB, there really isn't a need to go larger than that.