What's taking up the space?

[lugos]

Hello,

My friend called me this morning to tell me that she only had about 8 MB of free space on a 40 GB hard drive. She works a lot with pictures, so I helped her find pictures that she thought she had deleted long ago. She deleted those pictures, ran disk clean up, and now the c drive is report 1.4 GB of free space (about 3% of the total capacity). She tried to run disk defrag, but apparently that utility needs at least 15% of the total capacity to run. She has no idea what could be taking up so much space. She has deleted hundreds of pictures. Is there a way to narrow down our search to see what is taking up so much space?

Thanks in advance for the help.

[doctorgonzo]

Download and install this shell extension: http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/...xtension.shtml

It will add an addition tab in the Windows Explorer drive properties window that will give you the sizes of all folders and subfolders on the drive. It's great for seeing what is taking up all the space.

[glc]

Turn off system restore for now - that should get you several gigs back. Open a command prompt and type chkdsk /f - and answer Y to all prompts and reboot. Disk Cleanup does not remove all temp junk, you need something like CCleaner to completely get rid of those.

[mojo]

In addition to doctorgonzo's excellent suggestion, try treesize. The freeware version is decent, but the pro is much better and includes the same type of shell extension as the above suggestion, and it works much better imho. I believe you can use the pro version in trial mode for 14 days.

http://www.jam-software.com/treesize/index.shtml