HD used 120GB of 154GB. 35GB in movies. What is rest?

[atwnsw]

My laptop is predominantly for surfing the web and taking on trips. I booted the machine up today to get a defrag message since it said the machine had 12% defrag. Needless to say I was completely shocked that I would come remotely close to using the entire HD.

I know of about 35GB in movies which I burned to the hard drive.

I searched through each folder of the preloaded C: drive to see what else is taking up so much space and couldn't find a folder that had more than 10GB in total of all the remaining folders.

So, I suspect the hidden folders are taking up close to 80-90GB.

The only thing that I can guess is the backup software that comes with the machine: Thinkvantage backup and restore. I couldn't find the directory or size of my backup to see if that was utilizing most of the hard drive space.

Can somebody tell me how to search for the location/space used by this program?

Any other ideas what is taking up so much hard drive space?

Is there a program (other than windows explorer) that can help find why this hard drive is full?

Thanks in advance

Anthony

[Marin85]

What´s your OS? If it´s Vista, the following apply even more:
1. Hibernation file: about 3-4 GB
2. Lenovo hidden preload partition: about 5-6 GB
3. Windows shadow copies and restore points (system restore): tons of GBs if the OS is Vista!
4. Thumbnail cache (Vista)
5. Prefetch/superfetch (Vista)
6. Windows Media Library (since you have so much videos) (to clarify, that´s the information the recent version of WMP adds to your media)

EDIT: the latest (non-beta) WMP has an extensive media library also under XP (also SP3).

[atwnsw]

XP Professional

[Marin85]

Then you may find this thread useful. It´s still active. I almost start wondering if there is some HD space conspiracy against XP users

[pgoelz]

It sounds like the system is trying to tell you that your hard drive is 12% fragmented, not 88% full. ??

Paul

[awolfe63]

I use a shareware utility called windirstat. It gives a great view of where all your space is going.

[loyukfai]

I use a shareware utility called windirstat. It gives a great view of where all your space is going.

I second that software.

But it's released under GPL, not shareware.

BTW, the link: http://windirstat.info/

There's a portable version as well... http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/ ... t_portable

[Marin85]

Is this utility fast enough for larger hard drives? (fast enough= don´t have to wait 5 min till the scan is finished)

Thanks,

Marin

[awolfe63]

It takes 5 minutes on a larger drive.

If you can figure out where your files space is being used up in less than 5 minutes then don't bother. I can't.