Hard disk space, where does it all go?
 

Hi everyone,

I have always had a problem with hard disk space on my laptop. As the computer only has 20GB of space I try to keep as much free as possible. However, I notice that even during general day to day usage, the computer's hard disk space will start to go down slowly. Eventually I am left with a large amount of unaccounted for hard disk space.

Does anyone know what this could be? I have used disk clean up but this only clears the temporary folders and internet history, which is a very small amount. Would defragmenting my hard disk do anything? Any help would be appreciated.

log files?

Something I use (even on a 250gig hd not anywhere near to being filled) is Crap Cleaner, which cleans ... crap from your computer.

http://filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/

Uncheck anything that you don't understand, or don't know anything about. I clean the everything under the Windows tab EXCEPT the following:
Autocomplete Form History in IE
Old Prefetch Data
The entire Advanced
--I don't touch these, ever.

Under applications, you're pretty free to do whatever. I clean Firefox Cache, and thats about it. Nothing else is really that worrisome to me. In any case, run the Analyze function first and REVIEW. If you see anything you want to keep, find out what found it in the first place and turn it off. Then Analyze again and double check. Use Run Cleaner when you are happy with what is going to be removed.

-Also has a registry cleaner. Use if you are comfortable with cleaning the registry. If you would not normally manually edit the registry by hand, do not use the registry cleaner component of CrapCleaner

There are many places-o-hiding. Try ccleaner. Great little utility to keep things under control. It starts out as fairly aggressive so you'll probably want to deselect many things (like cookies) the first time before letting it fly. If in doubt just click "analyze" and examine its hit list.

Edit: Slow on the draw.

Treesize is a great little app to show you where your space is going. There's a free version on that site. Maybe you can hunt down some culprits.

I downloaded ccleaner and am quite impressed. Thanks very much guys, it was just the kind of thing I was looking for. Very small and effective. It's amazing how many missing .dlls and unused file extensions can build up on an uncleaned system, I had somewhere in the region of 600!

I think another one of my problems is the fact that so many pieces of software will disappear from the add/remove programs list when uninstalled but still linger around the program files directory. Very annoying! If a program comes with an uninstall feature you would hope the least it would do is uninstall!

Anyway, I'll definitely be using ccleaner in future.

Thanks phukraut, will definitely check it out.

you nailed a major possible component -- virtual memory -- when you noticed that your hard drive space decreases throughout the day. as you open and close programs, there are pieces of memory that the program doesn't "clean up," and some of that will be stored on your hard drive in the form of virtual memory.

anyway, try restarting once a day in addition to the suggestions above

a good practice (generally) with virtual memory is to set it to 3X your RAM for both minimum and maximum - that way it won't be screwing around with making the page file bigger all day - you'll have a set size and that's that.

It's okay, we're just promoting an awesome tool right?!

In other news - I created a partition on my harddrive and just told my virtual memory to live there. It can do whatever it wants in there, and I don't worry about it getting in the way of everything else on my other partitions

I have the same problem but its with windows media encoder, when im streaming media my hard drive goes down about 50mb each time, but i havent told it to save a archive file so i dont know where it all goes. Anybody know where it goes?

Thanks,
Chris

Aye that.

That works especially well when sharing with a dual-boot's *nix swap.

Not that memory or disk space cost enough to get a second glance these days. The only time I find myself worrying is on has-been systems, or farms, which I'm not around anymore. :( :(

BTW Shakran, 3x physical RAM is an awfully large amount for swap. There really isn't a valid rule of thumb unless total physical and the system's purpose are taken into account, which makes it less a rule of thumb than a table of thumbs. :)