Vista - free disk space slowly decreasing

hello everyone, i am glad to of found this forum. It looks like i will be active here, this has a lot of great things. BTW i am a nooby when it comes to this computer stuff.

I have just purchased a computer operating under Windows Vista, it is said to have a 250GB HDD. well now when i go to "computer" it says X(variable) free of 231 GB. im not sure what thats all about. I thought it would say free of 250.


But besides that, i have been downloading a few things, such as cds, low MB games, a few programs, this and that, and 'X' keeps dropping GB by GB every few hours. I KNOW there is no way possible i could of downloaded that many GBs within the time it dropped. My music folder is under 2GB, my videos are under 1 GB, my pictures are 8 MB, and the programs i downloaded were like winamp, vuze, AVG, itunes, and hypercam2. none of these are that big. I also downloaded a few ROMS (sega games that play on the computer, which are the low MB games) and these only take up about 10 MB each, I have about 4 of them. now as you can see, that isnt that much space used at all; for all of those things. ATM it says I have 182 GB free of 231 earlier today it was 186, i have no idea where the 4gb went because i havnt downloaded nearly that much. I am starting to think maybe i have spyware or viruses or something where another person could be using my HDD for storage. is that even possible? i have scanned my computer freakishly with AVG and no viruses or spyware detected.

I think i heard something like "computers keep logs of everything you do" well i have been on the computer all day since i got it ( 3 days ago) (x mas break :P) so im guessing there might be a huge log of unnecessary files that i can delete right? where can i find these and delete them.

I have downloaded Jdiskreport, and my biggest file are WINDOWS>winsxs at 5.4 GB there is also WINDOW> system32 at 2.5 GB. what are they?

Lastly, if a file gets deleted, does it become considered as free space again? because i do know that once you delete something from the recycle bin it doesnt get deleted right away.

Thank you guys in advance.

Hi plzhelp,

As to your HDD saying 230gb out of a 250gb HDD. This is because of the way the computer sees the GBs compared to how we would usually compute it. It has to do with Decimal GBs being let's say 1 GB would be 1000mb compared to Binary Gbs which would be 1024mb. So the ratio between them is roughly 0.931. So 250 x 0.931= 232.75 gbs.

And as to why your space is always being eaten up? This is because of System Restore Points. The task scheduler has system restore make a restore point at every boot up and also one other time of the day. Now you can also minimize the space System Restore takes up.

And you can also use Disk Cleanup to wipe all the restore points except the last one and you will get your space back.

The best thing to do if you want your space back is to use Disk Cleanup to get it back. Now all this can be a hot topic, considering if you limit your Sytem Restore points and minimize the space used for it, you can come into trouble when you really need to fall back on SR. So what I would suggest is to not mess with any other SR aspect except using Disk Cleanup. ANd only then when you're sure you have a stable system and can afford to wipe all other points away expect the most recent one. After you do this it will slowly start making more restore points.

And it's always good to have regular backups as well.

Why Is My New Hard Drive Missing Space? - Text Files on BrettBits.com (Flash Games, Music, Video)

Brinks tutorial
Disk Cleanup

Hi plzhelp,

As to your HDD saying 230gb out of a 250gb HDD. This is because of the way the computer sees the GBs compared to how we would usually compute it. It has to do with Decimal GBs being let's say 1 GB would be 1000mb compared to Binary Gbs which would be 1024mb. So the ratio between them is roughly 0.931. So 250 x 0.931= 232.75 gbs.

And as to why your space is always being eaten up? This is because of System Restore Points. The task scheduler has system restore make a restore point at every boot up and also one other time of the day. Now you can also minimize the space System Restore takes up.

And you can also use Disk Cleanup to wipe all the restore points except the last one and you will get your space back.

The best thing to do if you want your space back is to use Disk Cleanup to get it back. Now all this can be a hot topic, considering if you limit your Sytem Restore points and minimize the space used for it, you can come into trouble when you really need to fall back on SR. So what I would suggest is to not mess with any other SR aspect except using Disk Cleanup. ANd only then when you're sure you have a stable system and can afford to wipe all other points away expect the most recent one. After you do this it will slowly start making more restore points.

And it's always good to have regular backups as well.

Why Is My New Hard Drive Missing Space? - Text Files on BrettBits.com (Flash Games, Music, Video)

Brinks tutorial
Disk Cleanup

Oh, very nice piece of information there, helped me out a ton. Seemed to of answered all of my questions. Thank you very much, I really appreciate it.

You're welcome plzhelp. I have a headache after writing that. lol

geez, i bet, i got a headache reading it!

Yeah, lol. Here's a tutorial Brink just showed me, I should of just given that to you.
System Restore - disk space

Thank you, I will read it shortly. i have glanced at it and it seems to be very knowledgeable.