where have all my gigs gone???

i have a 140gb hard-drive in my laptop. yeh yeh small by today's standards i know. Thing is there's hardly anything on my laptop and its using up 100GB ??

My main folders are -

Music 22GB,
Programs 10GB
Windows folder is 4GB
Downloads 25GB


So somewhere im losing 39GB. Anyone got any ideas where it could be getting used? or a way i can free up some Gigs?

Thanks

 

You are missing some vital folders such as....documents? videos? pictures? user account (especially if you have a ton of temp files)?

System Volume Information is hidden and likely contains gigs of system restore points. What about trash?

 

Have you run any Chkdsk lately.
Have you run any virus or malware scans.

Possibly your hd could be going bad.

Virus's and malware can eat up hd room with out you knowing about it till its too late.

Is your Vram taking up a lot of room for ram space.

 

Is the hard drive partitioned in any way? Paging file will take some room. Recycle bin?

 

The free software TreeSize Free lets you see http://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/ where precious disk space has gone.

 

lord lucan...

All good ideas so far...

I have run into extremely large log files. You can use the program "Everything" to search and see if you have any large ones that can be removed. TreeSize Free is excellent as mentioned...

If you have had a blue screen event, you may have a file called memory.dmp in your Windows folder. This will be the same as the amount of your RAM memory in size and can safely be removed if you are over the blue screen episode.

Check your System Restore to see how many restore points you have. Hard disk space on my machine can fluctuate 10 GB (250 GB HD) just with System Restores.

Do you remove your temporary internet files? This is a good practice. You can run a cleaner set to run on boot to do this for you.

Some programs like Toolwiz TimeFreeze create a partition for storing data. If you have Erunt and it is set to save a copy of your registry on boot, the default number of them is 31 and they can easily be 100 mb+ each.

***
Do you have backups of your files, already? If so, you might consider getting a USB hard drive for your laptop. They have super cool mini size ones (approx. 3"x4"x1/2") and almost any amount of data storage you can imagine. You can get one for about $50. Pretty good option. You could at least probably move some of your information and get back 5-8 GB. O/C you could add to that a memory stick that would be more convenient to use and then have the disk for extra back up, etc.

Just some ideas...

 

Actually 140 is not small for today's standards, since most of us are using either pocket drives or cloud drives. I only have a 64gb SSD in my Netbook, most is stored on my Toshiba 1TB USB pocket drive.

 

My favorite tool to view where disk space has gone is http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/. The 'J' in the name of course indicates that it requires Java RTE.

 

I agree i have a main 160gig that is really all you need to operate windows.

 

"All you need" is subjective to what you do.


For me, les than 1TB is not enough. I have to constantly micromanage the SSD in my laptop.

 

Well in many cases true but most normal users dont need more then 250gig hdd.

 

I wouldn't even go so far as to say "most".

My wife is a "normal" user and she has over 30GB of pictures alone.

Imagine if she had music.

The OS alone will range from 25-40GB with nothing installed.

I have filled over half of my 256GB SSD on my Mac within the first 24 hours of owning it and thats putting most of my big stuff on an external drive.

I'd say 500 would tie over a lot, and 1TB, most.