On my Windows 7 PC, the free disk space has gone down by 1GB even though I haven't downloaded or installed any new files and I haven't downloaded any updates or other things? What could have made the disk space go down for apparently no reason? Is this the result of some sort of a spy program that is undetectable?
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A common stealer of disk space is the windows side-by-side (winsxs) assembly ( see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-by-side_assembly ) (also: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa376307.aspx ) (misreporting: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2008/11/19/disk-space.aspx ) This is a method used by windows to allow multiple library (DLL) versions to coexist on a computer system without the incompatible DLL problem which plagued older versions of windows. My limited understanding of it is that many of the assemblies are virtual, and in some cases Explorer will double count disk space usage, leading to misreports of used space. Windows 7 seems better than vista in this regard, but I personally saw my winsxs folder on Vista rise to about 15 GB. I actually ran out of disc space on the OS partition because of this. |
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Yeah the problem was system restore images being created and the space did always seem to go down after I put some new files on the computer or installed something. I checked the options and the limit was 10 GB and I've decided to turn them off as I don't really think I need it. Anyway thanks to everyone for their time in answering, my faith in humanity has been restored! |
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Another source of the increase is having Windows Previous Versions turned on. This feature saves copies of system and user application files (e.g. Word) whenever you change them. You can then recover back to a previous version if you need it. Go to Computer|Proerties|Previous Versions to see what you have. This facility can be turned off. |
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As Matt said, there are too many reasons that could steal your disk space, specially on windows. Yes, it could be from a spyware or virus, but picture that issue as a small computer fever and as such it's not a good diagnosis source. For citing another reason not cited yet, back in the days, disk fragmentation were a big issue. I'm not sure if it holds true today, but Microsoft still advices on doing it in windows 7. So go ahead and defrag once in a while, paying attention ideally you should have 15% free space before doing it. I love WinDirStat, from splattne's answer, and it is indeed a perfect tool for analyzing current disk usage, but not for finding a sudden free space lose. It'd be much better to follow RedGritty's advice and do a windows search for big files in the last days - or even mixing both. Don't forget that log files do grow up as well and are a very common responsible disk space eaters, like Viper said. Once you find the culprit, there's a good chance you could make good use of msconfig to "removing" the source of the issue. I used it for years on my late windows machine and no anti-virus or any kind of malware protection at all. So my advice to find it, is to use every tool at hand. There's no single tool able to help you with such a broad issue. Another tool highly overlooked in every OS is the log analyser. Console on mac, /log on linux and Event Viewer on windows. It can give you some clues on what might be happening with your system, if you're lucky. On windows it is overlooked for a good reason: most of times it doesn't log enough info. |
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Use WinDirStat, a freeware disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Microsoft Windows to see what's filling up your harddisk.
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It could be any number of reasons. My Windows 7 directory has steadilly grown over the months from 12 Gig to 22 Gig (mostly system updates). Possible causes:
Which of these it is, who can say? I would recommend jDiskReport from jGoodies which will show you what is using the space on your hard drive with some nice pretty pie charts. |
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