I have been having problems with my hard disk space getting filled up more than I think it should, and faster too.
I have Windows 7 with Service Pack 1.
I have two drives, C: and D:. Sometimes C: free space keeps going down unreasonably fast. The only genuine reason why I think it may be going down, is due to my opening too many Chrome tabs. But I realized that a while ago, and have been doing the following two things to hopefully reduce the effect of Chrome tabs on disk space: 1) closing Chrome tabs when done reading them, and 2) rebooting my PC now and then (I try to do it once at least every two days if not every day), so I think the effect of that should be mitigated now. I also run the Disk Cleanup tool often, when I get a low disk space warning from Windows, and even if I do not. Sometimes the disk space in C: seems to get a lot lower, and at the same time the disk space on D: gets higher. Sometimes only the disk space on C: gets lower. I do have an antimalware software installed on my PC (McAfee Antivirus Plus) and update it regularly and run quick scans almost daily and a full scan usually weekly. Apart from the earlier high number of Chrome tabs, I do not think there is any genuine reason (caused by me or any software that I run) for my disk space to keep on getting reduced like this. I don't do any heavy data processing, I don't watch videos much, I mainly use my PC for programming and writing (about programming) and browsing the Web.
Another thing I noticed today: I went into Control Panel -> User Accounts -> Configure advanced user profile properties, for the first time today, and saw that my main user account - called user, i.e. C:\Users\user, seems to be using as much as 8.12 GB of space. Why can this happen? And is there a way to reduce the space it uses? When I open C:\Users in Windows Explorer and then click on the folder called user under it, and do Alt+Enter to check its properties, it shows that it uses over 9 GB of space.
Any suggestions I can try to prevent this disk space reduction from happening? It has been happening for months now, and is a big issue - slows down my work, since I have to frequently deal with it. I had been uninstalling software packages from C: via either Control Panel -> Programs and Features, or sometimes via Revo Uninstaller. But I am running out of packages to install. I have also moved a lot of MB (sometimes GB) worth of data (mainly downloads of software, ebooks, collected over a few years - too much, I know) from C: to D:, but even after doing that multiple times, the space on C: gets full again.
I have over 30 GB of free space on D: at present, but under 1 GB of space on C:, and often, without my doing anything on C:, it goes down to even a few 10s of MB, then I get a warning from Windows that my disk space is low.