Home folder is too big for its contents

Question

I am new to the windows 7 environment, and frankly I'm not liking it. I'm using windows merely out of need. I like to keep my machine as clean as possible, so I was looking at the disk space. I have plenty of it available, but the used space seemed too much for what I have on the computer, which is practically nothing. Then I went to check my home directory. I right-click on it, and select properties. I see that my home directory has a reported size of 5.58 GB, and a size on disk of 5.62GB.

This is too much because I have only 4 images sitting on the desktop, and nothing else.

I wanted to see what was using all that space up. So I went folder by folder checking their properties, and none of them seems big. Then I selected them all, and their total size is of 333MB.

This is a brand new computer which I've used only to SSH into my linux server.

So the question then is, why the heck is the home directory 5.58GB in size? And of course, what can I do about this?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

it could possibly be your appdata folder, this tends to get full of crap if some of your apps arnt cleaning up after themselves properly. Try installing this, and running the cleaner, this will clean up any files that your system no longer needs.

http://www.filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/

If this doesn't work, you can always create a new username, then once you have moved anything other you want to keep, go to control panel, system, advanced system settings, userprofiles (settings), then delete the old profile. This will free up all the space it takes up then. Just make sure you copy anything you want to keep to your new user account first though as once its deleted its not coming back.