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General discussion

Missing about thirty gigs in hard drive. please assist!

Oct 6, 2007 2:31AM PDT

Alienware Aurora m9700
Vista Home Premium
AMD Turion 64 Mobile Technology ML-40 2.20 GHz
200 GB Hard Drive
2 GB RAM

I was just bored one day and just felt like checking my current disc space. I have a "200 GB" but actually 179 GB hard drive. The last time I checked my disc space, I had about 120 GB of used space. Somehow, an additional 30 GB got added and I have 150 GB used up. Knowing something was very wrong, I checked everything. I defragged, cleaned and uninstalled some crap files, and gained about 2 GB at most. Then I scoured my C Drive. I checked all the Properties of my files and soon started to check my C:\Users\[my name]\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows file. The file itself is about 31.67 GB and I checked inside. There was only 20 MB of stuff. So I tried to find out if there was 30 GB of hidden files there, nothing, just the 20 MB of files. Please help me, I'm starting to freak out that I have viruses and stuff. I might not be looking in the right spot but I do know something is wrong.

Discussion is locked

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system restore
Oct 6, 2007 5:50AM PDT

Unlike XP you can't set the amount for system restore on Vista.
This may not be your problem, but give this a try and see if you reclaim some disk space.
Control panel.
Performance information and tools,
Open disk cleanup
when that comes up click the more options tab.
Where it says System restore and shadow copies, click cleanup and follow that through.
Someone posted a way to get into the registry and set the amount of system restore, but I for one am chicken to go into the registry so I do it this way once or twice a week and it works for me.
Wayne

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didn't work
Oct 6, 2007 6:15AM PDT

well, that didn't work, but i lost another 5 GB. Can anyone identify my problem. I'm losing free space and I'm not doing anything.

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WHAT??
Oct 7, 2007 9:48AM PDT

So I leave my laptop on for a while, then I have about 11 GB left of space. I get pissed and start to transfer important files to an external hard drive. After a night of work, I lost about 2 more GB, totaling up to 9 GB. I shut off my laptop and turn it back on the next day. Somehow, I returned to about 37 GB free space. What is going on??

Message was edited by: admin

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System Restore...
Oct 7, 2007 11:31AM PDT

It creates a lot of restore points and each takes up a lot of space. You can configure System Restore by telling it how often it should create a restore point. I had the same problem.

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sorry
Oct 7, 2007 1:29PM PDT

The problem shouldn't be the restore points because I delete most of them. But my free space is really sporadic. Still don't know why.

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plus
Oct 7, 2007 1:48PM PDT

The description says that it automatically deletes old restore points. That's not my problem.