Windows 7 Hard drive filling up to near capacity

[dragonflyoh]

My hard drive fills up to within 5 GB of capacity without me taking any action. I run disk check and everything is fine until the next time I turn on the computer and the disk is full again. I ran a couple of malware tools and they found nothing. When I look through the directories I cannot find any huge files. I have the hidden and system files set as viewable. The HD is 300GB and has about 35 GB of real files. Any ideas would be appreciated.

 

[MikeHawthorne]

Hi

First run CCleaner... It will remove all the CCrap.

CCleaner

Link Removed

It won't remove anything you need.
If you've never done this you will be surprised how much junk there is.


Then try this, open window explorer and right click on each main folder (the ones directly under drive C:\).

Click Properties and write down the total content size.

Look for one that is really large.
If you find one that is 200 Gigabytes or something you can look through it to see what's taking up all the space.

If you don't find anything that looks out of place, add up all the contents and see how much it says.

It should add up to what ever it says is used when you check properties for C:\.

If it doesn't then something is hidden someplace, if it does then the stuff is in those folders.

Let us know what you find and we'll go from there.

Do you have any kind of automatic back up program running on your system.

Mike

 

[Medico]

Do you use hibernate on your PC. The hibersys.fil can get very large as well. To disable hibernate follow these instructions. Once disabled delete the hibersys.fil. Just type the file name in the search box.

 

[OldTimer]

I run a batch file to "Kill Hibernate" as one of my setup programs. Once Hibernate is turned off and the PC is rebooted, the huge Hiberfil.sys file in the root directory will usually just disappear. If not, it's easily deleted.

There are many programs like some anti virus programs that save a huge amount of temp files and log files. Those just never seem to go away. In time, those files will take up an awful lot of space. Once I identify such a folder full of those junk files, I put it in my cleanup batch file for daily cleaning.

To find those locations on your own PC, do a search for *.tmp, or *.bak, or *.log

Window's own Disk Cleanup program can also get rid of a lot of junk files, even more if you run it in Extended Mode.
Here's the shortcut to run Disk Cleanup in Extended Mode:

%SystemRoot%\System32\Cmd.exe /c Cleanmgr /sageset:65535 & Cleanmgr /sagerun:65535

Just copy and paste that blue line into a desktop shortcut, for a really great cleanup, without installing any new software.
First time you run it, there will be some boxes to check, for what you want it to delete.
I just check everything, BUT, Office Setup Files, Setup.log and Compress old files. (leave those things UN-Checked)

Keeping a CLEAN computer isn't Rocket Science, but it does require some dedication and effort.
My own W7Cleanup.bat program runs every day, during boot up, from my Startup folder. Then once a week I do a massive
cleanup of my HD before I do my weekly Ghost Backup of the C: drive.

My little PC rewards me for my diligence by running at break neck speed. It boots up in about 20 sec's and shuts down in about 5 sec's.

Cheers Mates!

 

[dragonflyoh]

First off thank you all for the help. I ran Cleaner and there was a large amount of crap! I then looked at file sizes and found the page file was HUGE! I checked the page file settings and they were out of sight. I set them to the recommended size, rebooted and things were much better. I then eliminated hibernate, ran clean up again and then did a defrag. All is running smooth! Thanks again for the help.