My PC Hard Drive Is Losing Space

Straight Talker

I have been having this problem for the last while where my HP desktop is constantly leaking hard drive space.Sometimes there are incidents when i check on my available hard drive space it say's i have let's say for example 5.50 gigabytes of memory and then if i check a few minutes later it say's i have 5.80 gigabytes of memory.For example just after midnight i deleted some files and i had 5.46 gigabytes of memory on the hard drive.Now i am down to 5.35 gigabytes of memory.The hard drive has been drained of that amount of space already in such a short time frame.I tried running C Cleaner before but that caused my computer to freeze.Im running this PC on Windows 7.

Dravokivich

There's some free software you can get called windirstat. It will show you which directories use up high amounts of space, as well as what the file types are.

It'll take a bit of time to run though, so don't be surprised if it may look like its hanging.

rolliepoley

Try cleaning your winsxs folder i'd say thats whats eating your space.

http://www.howtogeek.com/174705/how-to-reduce-the-size-of-your-winsxs-folder-on-windows-7-or-8/

STEINBERG

Straight Talker wrote: »

I have been having this problem for the last while where my HP desktop is constantly leaking hard drive space.Sometimes there are incidents when i check on my available hard drive space it say's i have let's say for example 5.50 gigabytes of memory and then if i check a few minutes later it say's i have 5.80 gigabytes of memory.For example just after midnight i deleted some files and i had 5.46 gigabytes of memory on the hard drive.Now i am down to 5.35 gigabytes of memory.The hard drive has been drained of that amount of space already in such a short time frame.I tried running C Cleaner before but that caused my computer to freeze.Im running this PC on Windows 7.

You mention "memory" Memory has nothing got to do with space. What size is your HD? 500gb or 1tb or what? How much of that space is been used up?

Straight Talker

STEINBERG wrote: »

You mention "memory" Memory has nothing got to do with space. What size is your HD? 500gb or 1tb or what? How much of that space is been used up?

Yeah my mistake sorry about that.It's a 2TB hard drive and there was about 30gb free until it started draining itself of space.

degsie

Might be worth checking 'virtual memory' settings as this could be using some of your disk space and can vary if set to automatic. You could change this to a custom 'static' size and see if that helps.

johnnybmac

You should also right click on your recycle bin - properties, then select "custom size"

Usually, the default size reserves up to 10% of your hdd space which is totally unneccessary.

Personally, I set it to around 1500 mb...

EDIT: Check for backup programmes running on your computer too...

Overheal

Shadow Volume Copy, probably.

Kinda bugged me about Windows 7.

ED E

Page file / hyberfile / Shadowcopy can all do this. Its kinda normal.

If you've a 2TB drive as your main drive and you're down to 30GB its time to buy a new drive, even defragging on a drive that full will be quite ineffective.

duckflyr

I would save all your data you want to keep and reinstall win7. Get a fresh copy, not a manufacturers install cd. If it is a laptop
get drivers from the manufacturers site. Get the basic drivers, ignore the manufacturers 'helper' applications.