Vista - Just Randomly gained 2GB Disc Space...

Oops. I meant 'Gained'. =p

Alright, I turned my computer on today and nothing out of the ordinary happened, but I noticed my disc space went from its previous 168GB to 170GB. I assume it's just because it cleared 2GB of uneccecary files. I doubt it's a problem, though, just wanted to ask you guys to make sure.

Also, is it enough to run weekly scans on all my drives with McAfee VirusScan and Windows Defender, or does it have the potential miss things?

I would not worry about 2GB of data. It may be the page file.
I have not run a virus check for months but I do have a virus checker resident to trap virus. I also have spybot search and destroy resident to stop malware.

As to how often you run you virus checker is personal choice. Once a week sounds good to me.

Hello DrKillPatient,
2Gig seems a lot of data to go missing, but if everything is running fine then ok, it could be old data that is kept for so many days/months, then deleted, or as roy69 say's a paging file.

I only run a scan when my system plays up, or my anti-virus program tells me i have a problem, unless your going to "iffy" sites once a week is ok.

Are you using an anti-malware program ?, if not try Malwarebytes. (link below). It's free and less intrusive than most others.


Malwarebytes.org

Hope this helps. Good luck.

That looks great. What's the difference between the free and full versions?

I have always used the free one. Activating the full version unlocks realtime protection, scheduled scanning, and scheduled updating, as i said the free one does everything i need it to do, i.e. get rid of malware.
Hope this helps.

Can the paging file be partially emptied? I just realized I have 4Gb ram... I know the paging file is up to your ram size, so can 2Gb be cleaned out of it, or does it have to be the whole 4Gb?

Yesterday my computer had gained 2Gb disc space for no reason. Today it's gone from 169Gb left to 173Gb! I assume it could be my paging file, as I have 4Gb ram, but it seems really odd. What's wrong?

I would not worry about it. There can be many reasons for the variance. A scheduled Defrag of your disk is one possibility. Another one is that you "lost" a few restore points. Have a look at your shadowstorage with VSSADMIN LIST SHADOWSTORAGE as cmd command (run cmd as admin). Look at the "used" and keep an eye on it. The variance may come from there.

Alright, here's the stuff it came up with. I can't make heads or tails of it.

I have 283Gb in total on my hard drive, 110 taken up, 173 free.
By the way, what exactly is shadowstorage? Shadow copies of files so they can be restored?

The difference between the Used and Max space is pretty close to what I've lost. Could it be that it reached 42Gb and cleaned itself out?

OK, let's take one after the other:

1. Your shadowstorage looks normal and healthy. It could be that you lost a few shadows (each shadow is about 1GB).
2. A shadow is a system restore point (just another word for it). The best way to look at them is with Shadow Explorer ( ShadowExplorer.com - About ) which is also an excellent program to recover lost files. I have made a little video tutorial on that: ( Tutorial: Recover lost files with Shadow Explorer « How-To Geek Forums ). May be handy in case you ever get into that situation.
3. The shadowstorage has a maximum of 15% of your OS partition. Once it is full, it will be reused - the oldest shadows go out and the newest go in. That may have been the phenomenon you saw. Your's might have been full and shadowstorage manager may have reshuffeled the space.