Vista Tutorial - Hard Drive Full?

I have a 250GB hard drive , vista home premium, just the usual software plus
Office 2007. I have approx 50GB of video, music and pictures. I have had
computer for less than 3 months and it seems that almost every day the hard
drive gets fuller although I am not adding anything to it - I am now down to
17GB. I have five separate users (the family) accounts.

can anyone assist please?

Thank you

Steve

Do you ever use Vista's Disk Cleanup tool?
Or use anything to clean out the stuff that gets left on your machine when
you cruise the internet?

Also, with five users, do you have any idea what the other four may be
saving when they use the machine? If you don't have any idea, that may be
part of the problem. I'm not saying you should snoop on your other family
members' activity (unless they're minors). But if you don't know what
they're doing when they're on the machine -- and, especially, online -- then
there's no way for you to get a grasp on what might be filling up your
drive.




"Cass" <stephen.cassidy3@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:uV1PdjyiIHA.4868@xxxxxx

Thank you for the reply - yes I do use disk cleanup - currently I could save
just under 1GB using this which would be my thumbnails.

Re other users - we have checked and there is no obvious answer there

Thank you

Steve


"DP" <nospam@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:Ot7PJtyiIHA.3400@xxxxxx

Login with an admin account(are all accounts admin accounts)?
Check each user profile for size(right click on a user profile and determine the size of each)
Windows and Office 2007, and all software on this Vista Ultimate machine(fully updated via Windows Update) consume 13GB of space.
Music(Windows Media) and Music(Ipod) and Pictures are on separate partitions and shared among 3 pc's on the network.

Additionally, while determing the size of each user's profile, do the same on the Windows folder(how large is it?)

--
...winston
ms-mvp windows live mail


"Cass" <stephen.cassidy3@xxxxxx> wrote in message news:uV1PdjyiIHA.4868@xxxxxx

Winston,

Thank you for the response - my Windows folder shows just over 10GB -
however when I look at my 'Users' folder it shows over 130GB which from my
knowledge of what I have on the computer does not seem right. I think in
total across all users accounts I have just over 50GB which is predominantly
made up of my videos, music & photos which are all stored on the 'Public'
folder.

When I then look at my own user account in 'Users' and just highlight with
the mouse it shows 2.17GB which I think is right. However when I right click
it and go to properties it then shows my own user account having 46GB. I do
not store videos, photos , music in there (all kept in my 'Public' folder)
only documents.

When I repeat this exercise with the other User accounts' (wife and
children) I get a similar response as my own for two of the accounts I.e
less than 1GB on highlighting with mouse and then when checking properties a
much larger amount of GB's

I am now assuming now this is why my HD is showing as practically full - but
still not sure as to how to fix it?

Thank you for your help

Steve


"...winston" <winstonmvp@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:8991C33C-1AFE-4AF1-A3E8-9EB15D8F70D3@xxxxxx

Hi, Steve. I can offer you a short term fix. Go to your hd, right click, choose properties, choose Compress This Drive To Save Space. By the way, defrag your hd might be in order.

Vista eats up drive space in realtime .. that is because of "system
recovery" is default turned on, it takes snapshots of the OS itself to save
the last working version. If you don't add new risky software or drivers
regulary I would tell you to just turn it off and clean the disks saved
snapshots - you will be amazed how much space it took.

Right click the "Computer" item in the startmenu and select "properties" - a
new window will open, telling you which edition you have and the like. On
the left side in this window you go to "advanced properties" -
"protection" - there you can deselect the disk being watched.

Of course vista will warn you with that annoying AC dialog.

Another thing is "shadow copies", but I think it's not present in the Home
Editions. This feature snapshots individual files every time a file is being
changed and offers to recover previous versions of a photo or document.

Hope this helps.

Olaf

"Cass" <stephen.cassidy3@xxxxxx> schrieb im Newsbeitrag
news:uQ3IUQziIHA.2396@xxxxxx

Olaf , thank you for your response. I have done what you have suggested and
freed up 29GB! Thank you. I still think however there appears to be some
form of 'double counting' going on across my user accounts as described in
my earlier message.

Thank you

Steve

"Olaf" <bubu@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:OT3%23Id3iIHA.3400@xxxxxx

On Fri, 21 Mar 2008 07:54:57 -0000, "Cass"
<stephen.cassidy3@xxxxxx> wrote:
Use a program such as ShowMan
<http://www.david-taylor.myby.co.uk/software/disk.html#ShowMan> or
SC-DiskInfo <http://www.soft-central.net/diskinfo.php> to tell you how
your disk is being used.

Cass wrote:You most likely activated the system restore feature (actually, it's
activated by default). If you want to be able to restore your desktop to
a previous state if ever it screws up, keep the feature. However, I and
others find it useless and disable it immediately. I'd rather just
reinstall.