disk space being drained?

[amm59]

Hi everyone,
I have a T60 with a 70gb hard drive. About a week ago, a message popped up saying I had low disk space. I uninstalled a few large programs that I no longer use so I was up to 18gb of free space on the drive.
But then, the notice popped up again! I looked under the properties for the C drive (IBM_preload) and it said I had something stupid like 615mb! What the heck? So I restarted, and I was back up to 18gb. Okayyy...
Well, it does this every day now. The disk space gradually goes from 18gb to nothing and I have to restart the computer. I've run PC Doctor, the defrag program, anti virus program, anti spyware program, I updated the BIOS in the Thinkvantage update... I can't find anything wrong with it.
The only programs I really run alot are Instant Messenger, Firefox, and IE (because Firefox keeps crashing on me, which is also annoying but another story).
Does anyone know why this may be happening? I can't understand where my hard drive space is going!
Thanks for your help

[Harryc]

The only thing I can think of is if you have Rescue and Recovery running a backup on a schedule and it never completes, just keeps running over and over every time you boot up because it runs out of space.

[Marin85]

@OP: I bet you have Vista installed It´s System restore creating various shadow copies and restore points that eat up your HD space. Search the forum, you will find some useful tips as to how to increase free space on your HD. A few other things to consider are:
1. Lenovo preload partition
2. Prefetch/superfetch
3. Windows Media library
4. Thumbnail cache
5. Hibernation file (if you don´t use suspend to disk).

Hope this helps

Marin

EDIT: Added 1-5

[amm59]

Harry, I'll check into that.

Marin, I have Windows XP. Also the other things you mentioned (#1-5)... I have no idea what you mean LOL. I'm not THAT computer savvy unfortunately.

Any other ideas of what it could be or how I can fix it?

[Marin85]

Harry, I'll check into that.

Marin, I have Windows XP. Also the other things you mentioned (#1-5)... I have no idea what you mean LOL. I'm not THAT computer savvy unfortunately.

Any other ideas of what it could be or how I can fix it?

The system restore thing applies to XP as well. Go to Control Panel -> System -> Advanced System Settings -> System restore/protection (not sure what it is called in XP). I believe there you should be able to set how much of disk space system restore should use (disclaimer: I haven´t used XP for a while). Since you don´t have Vista, forget about 2 and 4. Lenovo preload partition is the *hidden* partition that comes on the original hard disk with the laptop from Lenovo. If you are really sure, that you don´t/won´t need it, you could delete it to free up some space (but I wouldn´t recommend you to do so). The hibernation file is the 3-4 GBs large file where the system writes its current state and contents when going into hibernation. It is a hidden file stored on C:\. If you don´t use hibernation (suspend to disk), you don´t need it either. As for 3: If you have lots of music or videos, Windows Media Player tries in most cases to create a library of it, attaching a lot of information to it, which costs precious hard space.


Marin

[amm59]

Hm, okay. Disk space really *isn't* a problem here though, because I have 18gb free. So I'm not trying to free up disk space. Rather, I'm trying to determine what is *happening* to my disk space over the period of a day or so. This morning my computer said I had 0 disk space, I had to reboot and alas then I was back to 18gb. It's almost like there's some kind of leak somewhere...

[Marin85]

Apart from the things already suggested above (Rescue&Recovery and system restore) it could be also windows defrag scheduled to run that could possible take some of the HD space (while defragging, but after reboot that´s space is again free of course). But I really doubt that windows defrag would take so much space (18 GB) to accomplish his tasks. I would suggest you to take a look at the Task Scheduler. There you might be able to find some hint as to what application could be eating up your space.

[amm59]

Is "Task Scheduler" the same as the Processes list? If so, here are the programs currently running... (I'm gonna estimate the mem usage, too many numbers lol! and obviously they keep changing)

firefox.exe - 72000 K
rtvscan.exe - 68000 K
iexpore.exe - 46000 K
aim6.exe - 43000 K
explorer.exe - 35000 K
svchost.exe - 31000 K

Those are the biggest ones. Everything else is 18000 K or smaller.

I'm pretty sure I have the defrag program set to run at 3 am or something. I'll check on that.

[Marin85]

Is "Task Scheduler" the same as the Processes list?

Actually not. Sorry I should have been more specific, here you can find some useful info regarding Task Scheduler.

Marin

[basketb]

If my HD was filling up during the day and had 18 GBs free again after a restart, I'd look into the temp folder(s) and see what files are the space hoggers.
Also Firefox is known to crash when you run out of disk space for its temp files (at least for me it did once).

[Marin85]

18GB Temp files would be definitely the killer of every system

[amm59]

Ok *really* dumb question but I don't want to screw anything up... where are the temp folder(s) on my HD? Are you talking about temporary internet files? If so, I think I've deleted all of those...