Problem with Windows 7 hard drive space

M

MCS

Donkey Kong
So, on my Windows 7 laptop, I checked my hard drive today, and saw this:

fdzpn5.jpg


This doesn't make sense to me because all of my programs only take up a total of 1.6 GB. What could be taking up all that space? Last time I checked, it was at around 11 GB left, so this sudden drop in space doesn't seem logical to me when I haven't been using it as much.
 
Viruses? Have you been downloading/uploading a lot of things lately (like pictures, songs, etc.)?
 
Gundam Tanaka said:
Viruses? Have you been downloading/uploading a lot of things lately (like pictures, songs, etc.)?
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Nope. Like I said, I haven't been using my laptop as much. I mainly use it for playing Steam games and going on the forums. That's about it. I don't download songs or pictures.
 
You said it yourself already.
MCS said:
all of my programs only take up a total of 1.6 GB.
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MCS said:
I mainly use it for playing Steam games and going on the forums.
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Steam games can be really large.
There are smaller ones for only 500 MB, there are bigger ones that take up 13 GB already.
Consider deleting a couple of Steam games you no longer use, you can redownload them for free, at a later point.

Also, I'm not sure 70 GB is your Partition, or your full Hard Disk?
Other thing to note is, your Programmes store Cache, so if you don't open up to much at the same time, or at least, don't open up to much Tabs in your Browser, you'll become fine as well.
At least, the thing about the Cache applies for Mac users for sure, I didn't test it on Windows, but it's very likely it does as well.
 
MKGirlism said:
Steam games can be really large.
There are smaller ones for only 500 MB, there are bigger ones that take up 13 GB already.
Consider deleting a couple of Steam games you no longer use, you can redownload them for free, at a later point.
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No, you see, in Add or Remove Programs, it said all of my programs take up a total of 1.6 GB, and my Steam games are listed in there as well, so that's not the problem. And besides, why would a Steam game suddenly make my amount of hard drive space go from 11 GB to 2 GB within a matter of days, when I haven't even been using it?

Anyways, I'm going to try using Tucky's advice and defragging; I'll tell you guys how that goes.
 
Oh, that's what you meant?
In that case, you might want to check your partition, using this:
http://windirstat.info/
Then you should see where you've got the biggest space eater.
 
Well, I just finished defragmenting. It didn't help - in fact, my hard drive space went down to 1.73 GB free.

EDIT: It actually just went back up to 2.98 GB free.
 
It definitely sounds like Caching now.
 
MCS, keep in mind it's just a small Tool, not a Wii U Game, so it should fit 3 GB for sure.
 
MCS said:
So like, could you tell me what this program does? I don't want to download something that I have no clue what it does.
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WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for various versions of Microsoft Windows.
Note: if you are looking for an alternative for Linux, you are looking for KDirStat (apt-get install kdirstat on Debian-derivatives) and for MacOS X it would be Disk Inventory X or GrandPerspective.

Please visit the WinDirStat blog for more up-to-date information about the program.

On start up, it reads the whole directory tree once and then presents it in three useful views:

The directory list, which resembles the tree view of the Windows Explorer but is sorted by file/subtree size,
The treemap, which shows the whole contents of the directory tree straight away,
The extension list, which serves as a legend and shows statistics about the file types.
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It says so right in the site.
 
It's a disk usage statistics. It would view for you which items are taking up the most space in your computer and you can see which stuff you can delete. Clean up is a manual thing; you should determine what you should delete to clear up disk space and this program will tell you the biggest items that you can delete.
 
Somebody at work (back in these days) used this Tool, he could instantly see where the biggest files are.
That's all you can do with it.
 
MCS logic: Doesn't trust a simple Application that's for free; asks help that costs money.
 
MKGirlism said:
MCS logic: Doesn't trust a simple Application that's for free; asks help that costs money.
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Wait, what? My dad's friend helped for free, I don't know what you're talking about.
 
I thought it wasn't for free.
 
So why did you ask for help here if you knew you had the answer in your hands? :rolleyes:
 
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