Losing hard drive size

I noticed something is going wrong with my hard drive. Yesterday I checked my hard drive and it has 577gb free space. Now today I checked and it has only 572gb free space. It seem like every day, it loses 1gb. I haven't install any software when it was losing hard drive. It's like I'm virtually losing hard drive for nothing.

Btw, my computer said it came with 750gb hard drive but it only said I have 572gb free of 688 gb hard drive. I think 10gb of them are used for recovery.

That doesn't sound very unusual. My 750 GB hdd was 698 after initial formatting of Windows Partition- which is quite large for the opertating system we are both using. Since your backup takes up 10GB, count that too. Then there's the actual OS files which take up about 20GB, any programs you installed. You might want to run a disk cleanup, error-check, and disk defragmentation every couple of weeks. You can find them in properties of your c drive under general and tools. That will free some space, especially if you've been downloading at all. If you've already tried that then the problem is beyond temporary files and you are likely running a program on a reguar basis (with or without intent) that is collecting information and storing it in large quantities. Have you got internet security or spyware protection?

My computer came with Norton Internet Security 2008. That's the only security software I have unless you count Windows Defender.

I suggest you run those programs. After that, get some more security software. Norton isn't the best and it's probably only a trial- but only you know that. Anyway Norton will due for internet security but there are many more threats than viruses and some free programs that are very effective. You can get Spybot 5.2 and Ad-Aware 2008 for free at download.com- make sure you install the free version of Ad-Aware if you don't want to pay for the pro version.

Hello purefire.

You can use this to uninstall Norton...

Download and run the Norton Removal Tool

Then look here for FREE A/V, Firewall and Spyware progs...

Free Software List for Vista

There is some pretty good stuff there!


Later Ted

Hello purefire,

to get back on topic, this may be where your HDD space is going.

This is from this tutorial by Brink.

System Restore - disk space

By default Vista allocates 15% of your hard drive volume to storing System Restore points after installation. If System Restore is turned on much later, it may only allocate a minimum of 30% of the available free space instead.


Later Ted

well said and pointed out... i followed that tutorial my self and gained back nearly 50GB of my HDD space...
All hail King Brink

Thank you all for the help.

It will only be a trial, and in any case you need to upgrade to Norton 360 v2, then you don't neeed any more extra programs, Norton with Defender does it all, and don't let anyone tell you different.

don't forget to run "Disk Cleanup" as an administrator and select cleanup files from all users. This will get rid of some temporary files that will be eating up your disk space. Error logs can get huge. And of course internet browsing history gets huge too if you dont delete the cache every so often.