x60s - what's eating up all my hard drive space?

So I just got a used x60s and for the most part I love it. I've been spending the last couple days doing a fresh install and trying to get the thing set up just right so I can take a disk image and never have to worry about it again. I've had some trouble getting everything just right and getting rid of all the bloat and utilities I won't use, but right now I have one question --

Why is 7.8 GB of my hard drive already full?

I haven't installed any programs yet, and I've uninstalled everything that I knew I wouldn't need. I even deleted several folders from my C: drive that seemed useless (I hope I didn't need them -- one was called I386, or something, and it was like 1.2 GB of .exe's -- I figured they were just installer files). The funny thing is, when I highlight everything (Docs and Settings, Program Files, IBM SHARE, WINDOWS, etc.) on my C: drive and click properties, it says that they total 2.2 gigs, but when I go to properties for the drive, it says 7.8 gigs. What's eating up the extra 5 gigs? I tried doing the same thing with my desktop and the difference was much smaller -- 14.6 vs. 15.2 gigs.

Also, this is my second time doing a full restore b/c last time the system crashed when I was resizing the main partition and I had to start all over. Before it died last time, my c drive was 6.2 gigs, not 7.8.

Anyone know what's going on here? Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions... or links to help me optimize my ThinkPad.

 

recovery partition. you can make recovery discs using thinkvantage software (will take up a couple DVDs) after that you can just delete the recovery partition during your new install. The DVDs will contain an image of the factor install.

 

System restore is another that can take a lot of space which is always why I turn it off.

 

But the recovery partition is on a different partition than my c drive, so that shouldn't affect anything on the c drive, right?

 

But I just reinstalled, so I shouldn't have any restore points yet, should I? And besides, I think restore points are placed in the windows dir, so I could at least see where my hard drive space was going. My windows dir is 1.4 gigs, which doesn't seem too big. Unless you mean ThinkPad system restore and not Windows system restore... I don't know too much about that yet.

 

Did you include hidden files and folders when you selected everything?

 

Your thinkpad recovery partition is taking up most of that space, it is factory installed on there before you buy the laptop.

 

Shows what I know. I justed deleted all my restore points and freed up 1.5 gigs, which didn't affect the size of my windows dir at all. Why would I have multiple restore points after a fresh install? Oh, well.

I still have 4 gigs to account for and I still don't believe that this is because of the recovery partition. The recovery partition is a different partition and shouldn't take up space on my c drive. Anyone else have any ideas?

 

So I'm an idiot. The four gigs are for the paging file and hibernation.