Hard drive seems to be using too much space

I have a DELL with a 320gb hard drive with 288gb total with only 226gb available. I just reinstalled my operating system and DELL drivers and as you see windows and the DELL drivers take up 60gb of hard drive space; I think that is too much. DELL is telling me that viruses can take up space. DELL is telling me to reinstall the operating system again for the 3rd time. so virus or hard drive problems???

 

I doubt it's a virus. If you're rig has a pre-installed OS, the hidden restore partition will take some gigs, have you uninstalled all the junk that's there, meaning unwanted/uneeded program trials? Try TreeSize Free, it will tell you what the drive hogs are.

 

There's also System restore, hibernate and virtual page files that Tree Size won't show you and take a big chunk out too. You'll have to unhide protected files etc. like shown in the attachment to see what they take. Hibernate will equal your total RAM.

 

I reinstalled my operating system and when I did I properly deleted the partitions. When I deleted the partitions it showed me that I had 288gb free of 288gb, a clean slate. I then installed windows and checked my computer and it had 278gb free of 288gb (windows taking up only 10gb). I then started installing all of the drivers from DELL, I kept a watch on the disk usage while I installed them one by one. The only other programs I installed were Norton, CCleaner, and Advanced windows care v2 personal. After the windows updates and the Live updates from Norton I now only have 226gb free, using 60gb for just those programs; that is more space than some computers even have! What is going on??? DELL is telling me to reinstall the operating system again (what the??). I don't know what to do???

 

Hmm, here's a very recent thread about someone having problems with Norton definition files taking up ton's of space. It may give you a hint of where to look. What does TreeSize say?

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=179817&highlight=norton

 

I agree with Augie that Norton is the culprit.
Un-install it with this

http://www.majorgeeks.com/Norton_Removal_Tool_SymNRT_d4749.html

and load this (it free and very good)

http://majorgeeks.com/download886.html

I have a HP OEM and if i use the recovery disks it loads Norton automatically but that is the first thing i throw out.