Low Disk Space

My hard drive has been running constantly for the past several days and today I received an on-screen notice that I have a very low level of disk space left.I am using a Dell Dimension 4600, Windows XP Pro, have 160GB HD and 1.5GB RAM. I have run checkdisk, defrag, malwarebyte's anti-virus, ccleaner, Spybot Search & Destroy and PC registry mechanic. This speeded up the computer a little but I still get the low disk space warning.
The readings from the System Indo utility are as follows: Total physical memory - 1,536MB, available physical memory - 817.86MB, total virtual memory - 2GB, available virtual memory - 1.92GB, Page file space - 2.10Gb The hard drive still runs all the time.
Any advice would be appreciated.

 

Download and run WinDirStat to see where all your space is being used.

 

Search for *.hdmp files
From a paid newsletter that I subscribe to, these dump files can create lots of files in a day and are not removed.

 

Try using Process Explorer,
http://majorgeeks.com/Process_Explorer_d4566.html

Maybe you can at least see what exactly's using your hard drive...then figure out what's going where on it. Does your computer have multiple partitions?

 

What is your actual level of free disk space?
Open up "My Computer" and find your hard drive. It will probably say something like "Local Disk - C" (it will definetly be (C

Right click, and choose "properties". That should give you a pie graph of used vs free space. YOu can also from this property sheet click "Disk Cleanup" to let the microsoft disk cleaning utility run.

good luck.

 

Here are some replies to your various questions:
I downloaded and ran WinDirStat but am unable to interpret it.
Unable to find the*.hdmp files
The process Explorer site seems to be advertising only for PC Tools, nothing of value opened
Opened C drive and reported as being completely full
Have run disk cleanup with no appreciable result - only saved about 16MB

 

In WinDirStat the top pane lists all your Folders/Directories in order of largest to smallest. [So you would start at the top to see which folders are taking up the greatest percentage of space]{Windows and Program Files combined should only take up about 20gb maximum--you probably don't want to try deleting anything in them} The bottom pane gives a graphical representation of your files, largest boxes are largest files. Click on a few of the largest boxes to see the names of the files and post back if you don't recognize them.

160GB is a lot of space to have occupied unless you have a very large music, video or uncompressed photo collection. Something besides Windows files has to be taking up about 120gb of space. If you can't attribute it to music or video it is worth looking through a few of the largest folders to see if there is anything that looks unusually large.

The default amount of space for System Restore is 12% of a partition so this would account for 18gb or so and can be reduced separately.

 

Thanks to all who tried to help. The culprit was BitDefender Security Suite which I loaded about 6 months ago and has been unstable for about half that time. It apparently replicated files to the tune of 93GB over several days. I have replaced it with AVG for now and things are back to normal. Thnaks again, everyone.

 

Thanks for reporting back. It is helpful to me to keep a mental list of programs that could possibly be unwitting space hogs. Although, this might very well be a fluke and not reflect on BitDefender at all, I like to look for patterns.