hard drive space

just got a second hand laptop , it has 100gb hard drive , it has vista home premium and it says theres on 61 gb left , wheres it all gone , i have had a look about and cant see why theres only 61gb left , anybody any ideas , thanks

 

Well, Vista will most likely take up some 6 or 7 GB's, then there's the restore files which could be as big as %15 of the hard drive space IIRC, in your case 10.5GB, check your machine. Depending on how much RAM memory that you have, there goes that amount to hibernation. Check those out first.

Oh, it's a laptop, there's also a recovery partition too. I think you're fine.

 

Sounds about normal in my experience but there are free utilities that can show you in detail where it's gone. Here's one, and you might want to turn off the graphical display in Options - it's useless.

http://windirstat.info/

 

Or one posted here, called TreeSize. I'm not exactly sure why this isn't offered here ATM, I know I've seen it here before.:confused I hope that helps.

 

winsxs folder has taken up 11gb space on my hard drive :confused

 

Or one posted here, called TreeSize. I'm not exactly sure why this isn't offered here ATM, I know I've seen it here before.:confused Remember to get to folder options and 'show hidden files'. After that, untick the 'show hidden files' button there. Do not delete anything there unless someone directs you, and I don't mean a first time poster either. You'll get the full picture this way.

Please enclose your results using the # function.

 

What? There is no Winsxs folder as far as I can see. :confused Hang on man, you did say a laptop eh? That does seem rather large to me if that's the recovery partition but I'm not a laptop guy. Someone will chime in here.

 

It's 12GB on a Vista Home Basic system here that apart from Office doesn't have much software installed at all. winsxs is an integral part of Windows and should under no circumstances be tampered with.