BleepingComputer.com: My Hard Disk Space keeps fluctuating

Hi,

Thank you for taking the time to view this post. Hope I posted this in the proper section. I recently began experiencing fluctuations in my Hard drive space. One day it says 7-8 Gigs then all of a sudden when I check, it says 2 or 3 Gigs. I've cleaned the temp IE files and checked the AppData/Local/Temp and there is practically nothing inside. I am not sure why this is happenning or what program is causing Vista to keep modifying the Hard disk amt. This is a relatively new computer (13.3" Dell Inspiron 1318 Laptop, 3gig Ram, 250 gig harddrive)

Please advise as to how I can resolve this problem.

Thank you for your help. It is greatly appreciated.

Ice

Hi, to find where you space is been used you can download this small utility run it and find where the space has gone. http://windirstat.info/
This is a great tool that we use at work every day to track our servers that start to run low on disk space.

When you mean 7GB, do you mean 7GB used or 7GB remaining.

Hi all,

Thank you for your replies and assistance. Thank you Monty007 for the software! I will definitely try that! With regards to Swordie, I have about 7 gigs remaining on the hard drive yet 6 days ago I had 25 gigs remaining. I sometimes use Adobe Premier to edit videos for youtube posts and after a recent encoding of a file, I noticed that the harddrive space suddenly disappears. I've used CCCleaner but it hasn't found any temp files that take up space nor do I have any files loaded in the cache.

Please advise as to what I should do to resolve this issue if Monty007's doesn't pinpoint the problem.

Thank you very much.
Ice

How big is this hard drive, and about how old is it?

Edit: I realized you put 250. I know for a fact that System Restore will take approximately 36 GB Decimal or 33 GB Nomial. You can delete those restore points, but I'd be sure that your computer is stable first.

Hi Swordie,

Thank you for the prompt response. Sorry about the late reply. Wasn't at a computer for a bit. I recently discovered that each time run Adobe Premier 7 and encode a file for youtube, my drive space drops by several 100 mb. Do you think this could be the cause of my drive space fluctuations?

Please advise.
Thank you for the help.
Ice

It might be-- It might be saving some back up files or some encoding prompts and whatnot- but 100MB is a rather large amount. Try not using Adobe for a bit, and see how your HDD space runs.

I'd also suggest cleaning out some of the restore points, if you know how to. If you don't, I can tell you how.