Vista Hard Drive Free Space Issue

[PatTheRat]

I got a Dell Laptop through work around 6 months ago. The laptop is used to run Office programmes and not much else (asides from burning a few dvds).

My total memory is 60gb, and is showing just 14.5gb free - although I dont save anything onto this laptop. I estimate that I should have at least 50gb free space on my hard drive. Anyone know if this is a common issue.

And just to note, when I burn dvds - I never save the output files (and have recently checked this) so this can be ruled out.

[fo3nix]

Grab yourself this free app:

http://windirstat.info/

Run it, and it'll show you in graphical form where all your space is going. Very handy.

[vehelpfulguy]

Two things:

Is the 60Gb drive set up with one partition (just the C: drive) or is there maybe 2 partitions (C: and D: for example). I know Dell sometimes do this.

Secondly, in XP there is a Search option on the Start menu (I assume Vista has something similar) and you can search on your hard disk for objects by size.

Search your disk and see if there are any large files you dont know about. Maybe your DVD burning has left some large files in a temporary folder for example.

[Buenchico]

Shadow Copy has a nasty habit of eating disk space:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_Shadow_Cop y_Service

Run a search for *.*
That will find every file on your PC.
Click on the 'Size' column heading until files are listed in descending order of size. You should be able to quickly see what it is that's taking up so much disk space.

Chris

[PatTheRat]

All sorted - cheers fo3nix and vehelpfulguy. For some reason there was 20-odd gb of temporary files being stored.

[PatTheRat]

Cheers also Chris for the tip - just staring to get into Vista so these wee pointers will help me in the long run.