Windows XP: What’s eating up my hard drive space?

Please Try WinDirStat

In reply to: What’s eating up my hard drive space? by Lee Koo (ADMIN) 

Marie,

I guess there's a host of problems/situations that could be causing you to lose so much of your hard drive's free space. I can mention what once happened to me, and I'll also recommend a way to help you find the culprit.

With my new Vista PC, one day my hard drive, which had been 90% free, was suddenly just 15% free. I panicked for a moment, but I soon realized that whatever was causing the problem was doing so in a most conspicuous way. To locate the problem, I merely used Windows Explorer and went to the root level of my C: drive. Then I right-clicked on the first directory/folder in my list and selected the Properties function. Doing this will display a window containing basic information regarding the folder you right-clicked on, including the amount of data being stored within that folder AND within all its sub-folders. I just kept repeating this procedure with each of the folders at the root level of my C: drive until I found what I believed was a strangely large folder and repeated the same procedure with its sub-folders. Soon I determined that my version of RealPlayer (I don't recall which version of RealPlayer it was) had produced a file that I learned the purpose of. This one file was a really, really huge file ... approximately 70 GBytes or more. I did a little research, determined that a few other people had reported the same problem, confirmed the file was not needed, and I simply deleted it.

I found the culprit the hard way. However, I mentioned WinDirStat. This is a free Windows utility I've been using that's available from CNet's Download.Com site. I strongly recommend it and note that it has the CNet Editor's top rating, five stars. WinDirStat will tell you within a few seconds the same info that I had to go hunting to find. As you scan the output of the report, the utility doesn't tell you in plain English, "Here's your problem, Marie." But you can quickly and effortlessly peruse the contents of each folder and sub-folder and this will help to point you to the areas that are consuming so much space on your system.

Of course, you'd expect there to be a lot of data/software stored in folders such as C:\Windows or C:\Program Files. However, for example, if you don't have a lot of personal data yet — documents, photos, or music — yet you find there's a huge amount of space being consumed in your personal user folder, you'll have to explore each sub-folder until you find what's eating up all your space. If you see something suspicious, do a search on the Internet and chances are that someone else has reported the same problem.

I hope my suggestion helps. Good luck, Marie.