I keep getting a pop up window that says I am out of hard drive space on drive C. When looking at space available, the numbers change as I watch. I started with 2 gig and number sometimes goes down to 100 meg. Where is the space going. Who is using it. No viruses detected with avast. Checked to see what was running and all programs are appropriate. Can’t figure out what is going on. Any help?
Hi Kmagic, welcome to the forum.
2 gigs is not a lot of spare HD space on a typical modern hard drive. Routine read/write operations to the disk, include the use of the page (aka swap) file could account for a lot of the fluctuation, plus the creation of system restore points.
Or it could be malware.
I would suggest it’s more likely that since your disk is almost full, WIndows is having a hard time finding enough space to do what it needs to do.
Ever done a disk cleanup? Or a defrag? (You probably won’t be able to defrag satisfactorily with such little remaining space…need to move some files first.)
One of the big users of disk space is the System restore feature. With modern fairly large drives, you can end up with a lot of space dedicated to system restore points that you are unlikely to ever need.
If any of this makes sense, and you need to know more, just ask away.
Sounds logical. I will delete previous restore points and redistribute my hard drive space. My hard drive is partitioned into 3 logical drives. Total size is 110 gig. Let you know how it goes. Thanks.
PS I am using windows visita home version.
I wouldn’t delete all your restore points; just significantly reduce the percentage it uses. That should buy you a bit, maybe enough to clean and defrag.
As Tarq57 suggests, it’s not “exactly” good to remove restore points, unless you have to. Restore points have rarely been used by myself, but they can be useful to normal users.
I’d suggest adding an additional hard drive and moving files to it to help out with your space issues. That’s an entirely new post though, because it could potentially cause a lot of extra work.
Basically, run the disk cleanup tool, and maybe windows cleanup! from: http://www.stevengould.org/index.php?Itemid=70&id=28&option=com_content&task=view
and remove all files that shouldn’t be there.
If you find that you’re still running out of room, it’s just because you don’t have adequate hard drive space, and adding an additional one might help, or moving to a larger hard drive will help more.
However, moving to a new hard drive requires some knowledge of computers and some utilities such as Easeus.com’s Disk copy available here: http://www.stevengould.org/index.php?Itemid=70&id=28&option=com_content&task=view
to copy your hard drive to a new (larger) hard drive.