Vista taking up unusual amounts of space

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I have a recent computer with a 160gig hard drive and vista home premium.
I am having the problem that my hard drive seems to be filling its self up.
each time I look back at it with no changed or disk back ups being run there
is less space. I seem to loose close to a gig a day.
I have emptied recycle bins, cleared out unused items, run defrags, run
Norton 360, run every reliable spyware and antivirus I can get my hands on,
run a program called black light to look for hidden running programs (I found
several and got rid of them but it didn't help my problem)
I down loaded a program called sequoia and a program called tree size up.
Both of which confirmed what the windows explorer was telling me. Windows
vista keeps growing. Its currently up to 82.4 gigs with 38,364 files and
6,688 folders last night when I checked it it was around 81 gigs.
I have no idea whats going on. I would really like to have my hard drive
back as its starting to get dangerously low.
 
none of those programs are able to tell you where on the disk it is growing.

restore points is one thing that can consume disk space.

this is another weird anomaly that some people have that others do not.



(e-mail address removed)



I have a recent computer with a 160gig hard drive and vista home premium.
I am having the problem that my hard drive seems to be filling its self up.
each time I look back at it with no changed or disk back ups being run there
is less space. I seem to loose close to a gig a day.
I have emptied recycle bins, cleared out unused items, run defrags, run
Norton 360, run every reliable spyware and antivirus I can get my hands on,
run a program called black light to look for hidden running programs (I found
several and got rid of them but it didn't help my problem)
I down loaded a program called sequoia and a program called tree size up.
Both of which confirmed what the windows explorer was telling me. Windows
vista keeps growing. Its currently up to 82.4 gigs with 38,364 files and
6,688 folders last night when I checked it it was around 81 gigs.
I have no idea whats going on. I would really like to have my hard drive
back as its starting to get dangerously low.
 
PaulDaJedi,

You can get a utility program that can help clean up your hard drive, such
CCleaner, if you don't already have such a program. You can take a look at
CCleaner, a free utility, here:

http://www.ccleaner.com/

You can download and install it and just go with the default settings.
People speak highly of this utility, and I use it myself.

Another step you can take to clean up and to provide more hard drive space
is to remove all but the most recent restore points. You can do this by
double clicking on Computer and selecting the C drive Properties. Then click
on the Disk Cleanup button. In the window that opens, select the More
Options tab. You now will notice the option to remove all but the most
recent restore points. Do it.

After that, you can defrag the hard drive. Notice how much disk space you
have before and after all these above operations.
 
What I meant is that I keep using them to see that windows is getting bigger.
also it will grow in size when no back up has taken place. though I have
noticed that after running black light windows has stopped growing larger?
maybe there was something in there. is there any way to clear it back out or
do I have to reinstall vista? Is over 80 gigs an unusual size for vista?
 
I have a similar issue on my desktop, my situation is that after running
defrag,my hard drive grown up, it's really puzzled me. I even turned off
system restore.
 
I just DL and ran that CCleaner and it found 50 megs or so to delete but that
was about it. as for clearing previous restore points it didn't seem to make
much of a difference at all. Should I just be reinstalling vista at this
point?
 
one of my friend told me that the index may caused this problem, because
after cleaning disk, the live search may reindex on your system and refresh
index files on the computer, therefore he suggest I should restore index to
its original states to have a test, i'll try this method when i back to home.
I just share my information for you, which may also give you some hints.
 
All,

It's likely that the condition you are experiencing is nothing to be
concerned about. Vista conducts activities (like indexing, building restore
points, etc.) that utilize disk space and cause disk activity. This is
likely normal. Even so, if you care to research this further, you can use
google to search the Internet for additional information about this
condition. Good search terms produce good results. You can start by
searching on:

disk activity vista

or

heavy disk activity vista

You get the idea.
 
CCleaner is ok to run, but would suggest not allowing it to do AUTOMATIC cleanup.
review its suggestions and act on them yourself.



(e-mail address removed)



PaulDaJedi,

You can get a utility program that can help clean up your hard drive, such
CCleaner, if you don't already have such a program. You can take a look at
CCleaner, a free utility, here:

http://www.ccleaner.com/

You can download and install it and just go with the default settings.
People speak highly of this utility, and I use it myself.

Another step you can take to clean up and to provide more hard drive space
is to remove all but the most recent restore points. You can do this by
double clicking on Computer and selecting the C drive Properties. Then click
on the Disk Cleanup button. In the window that opens, select the More
Options tab. You now will notice the option to remove all but the most
recent restore points. Do it.

After that, you can defrag the hard drive. Notice how much disk space you
have before and after all these above operations.
 
I would not reinstall at this point.
not likely to improve situation.

if you are certain of not losing any personal data.
and need something to do for several hours guess it would not hurt.



(e-mail address removed)



I just DL and ran that CCleaner and it found 50 megs or so to delete but that
was about it. as for clearing previous restore points it didn't seem to make
much of a difference at all. Should I just be reinstalling vista at this
point?
 
here is a question. How big is Vista on other peoples computer?
82.4 gigs seems a bit large to me. 77of those gigs are in the system32
folder if that means anything
 
here is a question. How big is Vista on other peoples computer?
82.4 gigs seems a bit large to me. 77of those gigs are in the system32
folder if that means anything
Click to expand...

That's huge. This complete install including programs is only 24GB.
System32 folder is 2.77GB.
 
PaulDaJedi,

My system32 folder is about 2.5 GB. Yup, you got something in there. How
about system crash (dump) files? You may be able to tell just by looking
over the contents. Let us know what some of those big folders or files look
like.
 
if you did an upgrade the OLD system may still be hanging around.
look for something call OLD.



(e-mail address removed)



here is a question. How big is Vista on other peoples computer?
82.4 gigs seems a bit large to me. 77of those gigs are in the system32
folder if that means anything
 
That by any standard is huge. My C-drive with Vista Ultimate is 10.3 GB,
which is in keeping with Vista's recommendations about installing on a drive
with a minimum of 15 GB free. The Program Files folder is 1.52 gig and the
System32 folder is 2.52 gig, to give you an idea of folder sizes in Vista on
my PC. This indicates that the System32 folder is the culprit in your case.
Another PC in the house has Vista Business installed and the total used
space on the C-drive is 8.9 GB. So I would do a clean reinstall of Vista if
I were you. It means a few hours of concentrated application on the PC but
it will be worth the while at the end of the day. Once you have clean
reinstalled Vista and installed all your usual software, then do a defrag
and make a disk image using Acronis True Image or similar utility. I find
Acronis excellent. It takes about 10-12 minutes to make a backup and if you
ever need to restore the restoration process is equally fast. This way you
can do away with System Restore altogether; disable it. Good luck.
 
Turns out somebody installed Specter Pro on my computer and had it recording
full color images of the screen at a high rate and was not clearing its self
out. I ran Black light...found the program.....restarted the computer once
or twice and bang...problem fixed. Be warned Black light is the only
program out there that will find specter pro. Thanks for everybody's help
 
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