HD used 120GB of 154GB. 35GB in movies. What is rest?

My laptop is predominantly for surfing the web and taking on trips. I booted the machine up today to get a defrag message since it said the machine had 12% defrag. Needless to say I was completely shocked that I would come remotely close to using the entire HD.

I know of about 35GB in movies which I burned to the hard drive.

I searched through each folder of the preloaded C: drive to see what else is taking up so much space and couldn't find a folder that had more than 10GB in total of all the remaining folders.

So, I suspect the hidden folders are taking up close to 80-90GB.

The only thing that I can guess is the backup software that comes with the machine: Thinkvantage backup and restore. I couldn't find the directory or size of my backup to see if that was utilizing most of the hard drive space.

Can somebody tell me how to search for the location/space used by this program?

Any other ideas what is taking up so much hard drive space?

Is there a program (other than windows explorer) that can help find why this hard drive is full?

Thanks in advance

Anthony

 

Windirstat.

Windows Vista's System Restore might be contributing to it. I lowered the percentage used by System Restore on my computer, to save 10GB or so. In XP, there was an easy way to do it, but in Vista, it's slightly trickier. Take a look here: http://vistasupport.mvps.org/decrease_storage_space-allocated_to_system_restore.htm

 

use the disk cleanup utiltity in windows to take care of anything that is old backups from windows.

you could download process monitor from microsoft's website and try to find the directory that your backup utiltity is storing it's files in and deleting them.


Download Process Monitor

 

If you are running Vista Business or Ultimate, then Volume Shadow Copy may be keeping backups of your files and chewing up disc space.

In general though, it's probably just Vista doing what it does: Tremendous amounts of space to system restore, drivers for almost every product ever sold, fonts, swap, hibernate, rollback for every update, winsxs, etc.

There is a great read about disk usage in Windows 7 (applies to Vista as well) on the Engineering Windows 7 site.

 

VERY WELL SAID