Where's All My Disk Space Going? (Vista)

how does this WinDirStat works

 

Depending on the context of your question it:
a) works very well
or
b) works by scanning your hard drive and finding the biggest files

 

Thanks for the information

 

hello
I have a similar problem, though my computer is pretty new, so i was suprised with how quickly so much space went missing.
I have four partitions. all the partitions are empty as they should apart from the system one. i know system vista takes some space with it's pagefiles and restore points but i'm quite sure this isn't the problem. my system parition has a size of 107gb, and with JUST vista (obviously there are some minor programs like adobe reader, nero or drivers) i've got 20 gig left!
in that windirstat program you recommended when i get to choose which partition to scan, it's showing the same thing that 'my computer' is, so that there is 20 gb left on the system partition, but after the scan it tells me there is 30 gb of partition's space USED. so i don't get how after taking away 30 from 107 you're left with 20?!

oh yeah one more thing: it hasn't been like that always. i've noticed that problem after a month of using my new computer.

 

I got a new DELL INSP1548 T5800 during first week of January this year..



I have f*** all on this laptop, I only run music and s*** off of my external.. Was wondering if anyone would be kind enough to explain to me where the hell the memory is going to.

Im such an amateur at best of times with this.. so simplified replies would be appreciated. Cheers.

 

You're missing 42GB, which with all of the files from Vista, as well as the other programs that came on the computer, is really not too bad. Most of the space is probably going to Volume Shadow Copy.

Basically, with 181GB free, don't worry about it until the disk is really full.

 

I am running Vista Home Basic on a very basic Toshiba laptop. I have a 70 GB + hard drive with 2 GB of RAM. Increasingly Vista has been reducing available HD space until literally only a few Mb left. Yesterday I had about 400 Mb left and used clean up for temp files etc. and after that only had a 200 Mb left which really helped. Even though in theory should be 30-40 GB space available. Ran defrag but this left LESS memory. Used Disk Cleanup - System Restore & Shadow Copies to delete all RES points, and then recreated one RES point - this freed up about 10 GB. However there is still approx 20-30 GB not accounted for or usable which is a pain. This seems to be related to how Vista does it's stuff, and has nothing to do with what is actually using memory. I have no backups on C drive so this not a factor. If this is due to Shadow Copies keeping in mind that cannot use with Basic version, then obviously should be able to turn off - understand you can reduce allocation of 15% to 0%. My point is that the missing memory, approx 30-40 GB is much more than 15% anyway and this means something else is happening that I am not aware of. I have no viruses etc. and using Norton 360. I also ran memory diagnostics and memory is OK.

 

Is this normal?

Ok, I have 139 GB Harddrive, which is 118gb because of all the bloatware XD, and now it is 109gb, and i didnt download anything, only mozilla firefox, and feeding frenzy 2, and diner dash, which hardly takes up 70mb, where is the other 11gb?, please, i've been worried about this alot, as i got it 5 days ago, its a HP Pavilion DV4 1106ee, i have a recovery partition. Please tell me if this is normal.

Also, whenever i go to internet explorer it adds like 800kb to 1mb to used space in my disk. and when i load a youtube vid, it also takes like 5-10mb. is That also normal? and will it ever stop, i don't want it to go to 00. please i'm worried about this.

Also i ran scans with two antivirus programs Kaspersky 2009 and Norton Antivirus 2007 or 08, not sure, and it said no virus.

and the system restore is on, i didnt even touch that. and i dont know what disk cleanup is so i dont wanna mess with that, please annswer my questions thanks

 

Most of your concerns are addressed in the guide on the first page of this thread. Please read that.

When you use Internet Explorer, it downloads files to your computer. This is how using the web works. Youtube videos are bigger than many other files, and will take up more space than other internet files. There is a limit that IE will not go over, so it will stop getting bigger eventually.

139 to 109 is nothing to worry about, so you don't have to be concerned. If it gets so there's only 15G free or so, then you should try to figure out why.

 

Orev, thanks for the useful post. I had about 65 GB go missing on my Vista boot drive, and it turns out that there were a zillion shadow copies. Of course, the very first tip in your post was the one. The reason I found this post was because the various disk usage utilities do not seem to find shadow copies even though they take up free space (I first tried FreeDiskAnalyzer, and then WinDirStat). I recall from earlier versions of Windows you could limit the size of Sytsem Restore points with a slider on the Disk Properties, but now there an obscure command line required. Not sure how I was using 50 GB on a 100 GB partition except that I resized the partition via Acronis and the size of shadows was left configured for 15% of 500 GB which would explain the 65 GB (and growing).

Anyone know why the analysis programs can't see the shadow copy files? (Or even why Microsoft in their infinite wisdom lets you delete all-but-one, or none, as your options? It is truly mind-boggling to see hom many really badly implemeted "features" of Vista there are).