EggXpert

I have been running Vista for a few months now and haven't really had any noteworthy problems up to this point.

But recently I have been noticing that unused space is mysteriously disappearing  from the C: drive.  It got down to about 6GB free and then a day or two latter I found that there was less than 1GB free.  I know for a fact that I myself didn't put anything that big on the drive, including installing anything.  So, I look around and got rid of old stuff that was taking up space and uninstalled a few things I never use much.  This brought it back up to 11GB free.  Now it says that there are only 6GB of free space!

Any ideas on what could be stealing my disk space?  I'm running Vista Business SP1 x64

 

Have you checked system restore to see how much of the drive it is allowed to use? It might be using up the last bits of your drive.

You also might make sure you do a thorough  Virus and Spyware scan on your computer.

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GmsCool:

You also might make sure you do a thorough  Virus and Spyware scan on your computer.

 Oi, please check for viruses or bizzare internet connectivity issues. You may have a DCC/torrent/FTP bot on your machine.
 

Thanks for the replies.

System restore is something I had not thought of, I'll look around and see if I can tell how much it is allowed to use.  I am also running a complete system scan right now, just to be sure.
 

There is a utility called Scanner.

It is really good at mapping out your HDD and telling you what is taking how much space all in an easy to read graph.

Run it and drill down on what it is that is eating your space. 

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Updated Utility thread without downloading

More info

Well thanks for all the help guys!

I did a complete virus scan and found nothing unusual; I had also used windows disk cleanup and that didn't do anything.

I tried the scanner application and I think I found a program that could have been the culprit, so I'll just keep an eye on things for a little while and hope that was it.  That scanner program is pretty cool.  Thanks again! 

The shadow copy system will use space. If enabled, each time you save something Vista simply renames the original and hides it. The new file is saved, and the original file becomes the backup. The amount of disk space that shadow copy uses can be determined by the user or completely disabled. I'm not currently on a Vista system so I don't remember where this is, but I'm sure Google will be handy! There could be some other things but I would check that if you haven't already. Cheers!

EDIT: For example, 1GB Photoshop file can quickly become 10GB if you are working for a few hours and save the file 9 times. Windows will keep each version, hidden, until the disk quota is reached for the shadow copy service. More on that here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/features/details/shadowcopy.mspx
 

Vista will continue to use a lot of disk space. make sure that you have disabled the system restore, the 64bit ultra has been seen to take 40GB with out the end-user knowing this happend. And it does not help with SP1 either. MS is well aware if this and is laughing all the way. You will have to have 15GB free at all times. 

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=64

http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/help/1264bc24-72a8-48aa-84e3-a355327139d91033.mspx

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4996998.stm

 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/919183

Windows Vista Home Premium, Windows Vista Business, Windows Vista Enterprise, and Windows Vista Ultimate

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One is that the disk is used for the restore system, the function has been included in windows OS since windows XP. Check your OS reference, you can delete the restore points or turn off this function for cleaning your disk.

The other is the temp files in the disk, including internet temp files, system temp files, app temp files and etc. Try to clean them to solve your problem.

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