Hard drive space

Hi-
I have a 160GB hard drive, which means that i have about 149GB of usable hard drive space minus the space that lenovo takes out for system recovery
That leaves me with 143 GB of space.
Up until about 2 days ago I was using about 70GB of that hard drive space leaving me with about another 70GB left over.

Recently I realized that I now have only 5GB left on my hard drive and I have no explanation for where all that space went.

Can anyone help me find what is taking up all my hard drive space?

Thank you.

 

Before anything else, I'd make sure the capacity of the drive is still being correctly reported. Right click on My Computer and choose Manage, then on the management window choose Disk Management. In Disk Management, you should see your drive capacity and total in use. If it's showing a 143 GB partition and its more than 90% in use, then it really is something taking up that space.

Could be any number of things. If you lost 65 gigs at once, I'd start by looking for really large files that might contain a large portion of that. Do a Windows search and in the Search Options section check the Size box and tell it the file must be at least 51200 KB. Search for that and it should find all the files over 50 megs. Put the files in order by Size by clicking on that header at the top of the list. See any huge files that you don't remember installing or creating? Delete those, if you're sure they're not important.

Go to C:\Documents and Settings\(Your username)\Temp and delete everything in there. Also, if you use Internet Explorer or a derivative there of, open it up and go to Tools/Internet Options and click the Delete Files button, check Offline files, and then click OK. That will delete all the Temporary Internet files.

Right click on My Computer, click on Properties. In the properties window, click the Advanced tab. Under Advanced hit the first Settings button. In Settings, click the Advanced tab also. At the bottom of that window you should see your Virtual Memory. What does it say the size of your paging file is? It's normally set automatically and is usually about half as much as your total RAM. So if you have a gig of RAM the page file might be 1500 MB. If that number is 5 or 6 digits long, Windows may have gone crazy with your page file. In which case you could manually change it to something closer to your RAM plus half.

Empty the recycle bin, compress your e-mail if you use Outlook Express, run a chkdsk and a defrag on the drive to make sure it isn't just whackily misreporting the size for some reason, and possibly you might want to run a virus and spyware check to make sure some malacious program isn't eating up your drive space on purpose.

 

When you're in Properties for My Computer, check the System Restore tab to see how much it's using. If it's a lot, either disable or lessen the amount.