Problem with the free space on my hard drive?

Question

I recently bought a sony vaio VGN-CR24G with a hard drive of 120GB and windows vista home premium as the OS. I only have a single drive which shows its capacity as 102GB. The problem is my hard drive space is getting filled up without putting any file or installing any kind of software. Even activities like burning a DVD or surfing the internet is eating up the space rapidly. In the morning I had 82GB free space out of 102GB, after surfing the net for 2 hours, it showed 79 GB free of 102 GB. What is eating up the space on my hard drive? Also can anyone help me with the total size of the drive. I understand that some 9GB is taken by the recovery drive but still the total capacity of the drive should be 120-9=112GB. Why do I only have 102GB available? The OS and system files which take up around 9 GB are in C: drive so why is it that the total space available on C: drive is 102GB? Please help me out.Thanks a lot in advance.

Answer 1

i would look on the drives label, and then compare it to how it is defined in bios for cylinders/ heads/ sectors ... just to see if it is being defined correctly by the system ...

Answer 2

If the recovery drive is 9Gig and the OS and system files are 9Gig that equals 18Gig...which would leave you with 102Gig.

When you surf the net, you are downloading files. Tracking files, and pictures on the websites etc. are also downloaded to your computer. This could be taking up the hard drive space. It depends on what sites you are visiting and what you are doing at those sites. If you are on a site that you look at pictures, if they are large, every time you open one a copy is being put on your hard drive. This has the potential to take up a lot of space.

What browser and version are you using? If you are using IE7 you can do a few things. Click on Tools/options under browsing history, click delete then click delete all.

Then click on tools/options click on the advanced tab. scroll to almost the bottom and put a check mark in the box for Empty Temporary Internet Files folder when browser is closed. This should help you some.

Answer 3

1. look in the root folder for a file called pagefile.sys. it will be hugh. its the virtual memory file that your system uses when it needs to swap memory out to the hard drive. you can change the size of that by changing the amount of virtual memory your pc has.

2. the smaller capacity is because of the os. it always takes up about 10% of your total hd space.

hard drives are ridiculously inexpensive now. a 1/2 terabyte (500 gbs!) is about $100. They plug into your usb port.

good luck.

Answer 4

When you "surf" the net, pictures are saved in cache files. You could clean out these files and free this space.

Answer 5

I agree with Seta for the easy explanation. Try this free download it's called CCleaner (yes two C's)
http://www.ccleaner.com/

Answer 6

Some hidden files or folder in you HD, you can change the folder's attribute.

"Tools"--"folder setting"--

http://www.icoola.com

keep web URL easy as 1-2-3

Answer 7

When you burn DVDs do you delete the work file?
Empty your temporary internet files also.

Answer 8

Temp files and virtual memory.

Answer 9

Take your PC back to the store, it would appear that you have some kind of orrigonal virus I have never heard of.

Answer 10

download free trial tune up utilities 2007 and make disk cleaner or download win optimizer 4 or run cleanmgr. any help [e-mail] please select me as best answer.