Hard drive space disappearing into thin air ~1gb per day (on a new Windows 7 install)

After my XP system crashed I got Win7 Ultimate clean installed. Ever since I've been having bits of hard drive space disappearing, like around 1 GB per day since the repair 12 days ago.

I've been running WinDirStat regularly and it looks like it's all getting eaten up by C:\Windows. Out of a 80gb drive with 72gb available, the Windows folder is taking up 12.4gb and growing. 56% of that is in the winsxs folder.

There is a separate black folder called "Files" with hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys. It has been at a steady 4.4gb from the start.

Everything else looks normal, steady and accounted for.

My research found these threads that seems to describe the same issue
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=186905
http://social.technet.microsoft.com...l/thread/7ba68d6e-df7e-4d12-8763-47f0834036e6 (see Row3llD's post near the bottom)

Before I do anything myself I wanted to get some expert opinions from here.

System details:
Dell Dimension 4600
2.66ghz Pentium 4 2.5gb RAM
Windows Ultimate 7 SP1, 32-bit
Seagate ST380011A 80GB 7200RPM ATA

 

Re: Hard drive space disappearing into thin air ~1gb per day (on a new Windows 7 inst

Doug...

I have run across this on my XP SP3 machine. It's always been a log or a backup of some kind.

I use Erunt to back up the registry, and I have it set to back up into a folder in Windows automatically (they can be accessed from the "Advanced Boot Options" menu if they are in Windows). Before I figured out how to set the folder to keep the most recent 5 (created on boot), it was set to keep 30 and each one 110 MB! I have had logs grow to 150 MB.

The worst one is memory.dmp. It's the same size as the amount of RAM in the machine, so it's 4 GB on my machine. There would always be one after a blue screen if I didn't pull the plug when it starts performing the dump. I still get the mini dump files, and I don't have many blue screens, anymore.

If you have TreeSize free or even better Everything (sort to file size), you can really get in there and see what's causing the problem. I use the "Options" tab in CCleaner to "include" log files and backups that I want removed on a regular basis. Then I set CCleaner set to run at 5 A.M. every morning...