500GB HD showing 99%full - WinDirStat showing 133GB used?

I am running the following system on a Dell Inspiron:

• Vista Home Premium 64bit
• Pentium Dual-Core 2.7ghz
• 4.0gb RAM
• 500 GB HD

My HD says it is 99% full. However, I have read all of the posts here for assistance, used disk clean-up, culled unwanted programs/files etc. and the size continues to grow.

I ran WinDirStat and it shows that only approx. 133gb is being used -- which is far more realistic.

I have ran a full system virus scan with Bitdefender.

What else can be the problem?

Thanks for your quick attention. I appreciate your help.

~MaHai

Welcome
Off the top may I suggest the obvious. Test your hard drive

Test Hard Drive HD Diagnostic or this test Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities (Storage) - TACKtech Corp.

You probably have a lot of shadows (Restore points). Open an elevated Command Prompt (run as admin) and paste this command in:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

Then hit Enter. You get 3 numbers. The one that is interesting is Allocated. If that is more than 15% of your partition, then you should resize it. The command is:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=C: /on=C: /maxsize=10GB

Then hit Enter again. If you want more than 10GB, just change the "10". Figure about 500MB to 1GB per restore point. So 10GB would allow for about 15 Restore Points on average. That should suffice for normal operation.

Thank you guys for the great help. my shadow drive was unbounded at over 300gb!

great job!!!