M6600 hard drive problem

Hi. I was hoping someone could help me with this.

I've got an M6500 with a SSD C: drive. If I right click on the C drive and click properties, it tells me I've used 56 GB. If I select all the files and folders (I've told it to show hidden folders) the total size is 62 GB, so only a 6 GB difference which is fine.

I've just received a new M6600 from Dell and installed a few programs. When I do the same thing, the drive properties tells me I've used 76 GB, but the total of all the files and folders is only 47 GB - i.e. a 29 GB difference!!

Does anyone know what could be causing this??

Thanks a lot

 

Found what it was - found some other settings that showed some more hidden files - the pagefile.sys is 16 GB and the hiberfil.sys is 12.5 GB... Don't know what these are or why they're so big.... Will look into it...

 

Those are regular to see with any Windows install. The more system memory you have, the larger they are.

hiberfil.sys is reserved space so that it can dump the contents of your memory to disk when you use the "hibernate" feature. pagefile.sys is space reserved for use as additional memory if you manage to fill up all of your system RAM. Either of them can be disabled but I'd recommend leaving them alone.

Also, when you select all files and folders and do "Properties", you'll probably get a higher size than what you really are using. The winsxs folder in the Windows folder contains a lot of duplicate files. They are actually hard-linked to the same original so the duplicates don't take of any additional space — however, Windows Explorer will count them multiple times in the properties dialog.

 

Thanks for the reply mate that's helpful