free storage myteriously disappearing

When I start up Windows 8, I have about 1.2 gigs free space remaining.. but this amount fluctuates on every startup.. sometimes its 500mb, than even 3 mb, than 0 space remaining.. than jumps back to 1 gig on next startup. Whats going on with this free space? I checked my updates and it doesn't seem like any new updates are being installed so where is this space going? Anyway to fix it ?

 

get a bigger hard drive before its too late.
there has to be a certain amount of free space for it to work. not sure how much so someone else can answer that one.

 

You could try Windirstat (portable). It will show you which files / folders are using up the most space. That might help you narrow down the problem.

WinDirStat Portable | PortableApps.com - Portable software for USB, portable and cloud drives

 

It could be the paging file, if you have Windows set to manage it automatically. I can't remember if that's the default, but it may be. If that is the case, then as you use more virtual memory, the paging file may grow in terms of the amount of hard drive space it uses.

It could also be temporary files that are deleted when your computer shuts down. This is not necessarily out of the ordinary. Back in the day, I had a Windows 98 desktop that had 50 - 100 MB of free space on the C drive by that point. Sometimes it was closer to 50, sometimes a bit over 100. If you used it intensively for a long time, it would drop near or even to 0 bytes of free space. I don't remember if that was temp files or the paging file, but the fluctuation was normal. Of course, that was with Windows 98 and a 13 GB total hard drive - the fluctuations tend to be larger nowadays with computers that are so much more powerful.

You could use WinDirStat or JDiskReport to see what's taking up the space, and if you run it both when you have 1.2 GB free and none free, you may be able to spot where the difference is. My guess is it's either the C:\ root (paging file), temp files in C:\Windows, or temp files in C:\Users. However, MrDJ is right that you should really be considering getting a bigger hard drive, or at least deleting unnecessary files, if you're chronically that low on space. With modern versions of Windows, it's unlikely that you'll run into anything catastrophic. I was really low on space a few years back with XP (see attached screenshot - from 5.5 years ago. Good thing I still had 4096 bytes free!), and nothing really bad happened, and I can't recall any disasters with 98, either. But, nonetheless, it's kind of nice not having to delete something everytime you want to install a program, and not having saves fail because there is no space.