Hard Drive 282GB almost full, how?

waterwatereverywhere

Hi,

I have a laptop with a huge C drive capacity of 282GB.

In Windows Explorer recently this has been highlighted red and states that there is only 25GB left of the 282GB,

I only have documents, photos and music stored and this might conceivably amount to around 60GB but there is no way I would be anywhere close to filling 282GB.

Please can anyone help me find out what is going on? The only other things I do is to download BBCiPlayer programmes but I was under the impression these are removed from your system once they are expired or have been watched. Am I incorrect - should I be going somewhere on the hard drive to remove old programming? This is the only thing I can think of which might be using up so much space.

The only other thing which might be causing a similar problem is Spotify but I use Spotify free so I don't think that downloads anything as it only plays live over an internet connection.

Many thx in advance.

arrallas

Download Windirstat which is free. It takes a while to scan your hdd and then gives a graphical display of exactly how your drive is being used. This will help you decide which files you can safely delete.

prowla

You could try doing a disk cleanup (I'm not on a Windows PC at the moment, but it's something like right click on the drive, properties, tools).

[Deleted User]

I wouldn't call 282GB "huge".

Even my little 10.1" Medion has a 500GB Hard Drive.

Any chance you have multiple copies of your files?

Zandoni

Have you got a windows.old folder, if you have it contains an old Windows installation and can be deleted via Disk cleanup

Jivesinger

arrallas wrote: »

Download Windirstat which is free. It takes a while to scan your hdd and then gives a graphical display of exactly how your drive is being used. This will help you decide which files you can safely delete.

Do this first.

(Or Treesize Free or other similar tools.)

Then some of the other posts may apply.

Big_Graeme

iPlayer does delete the files as you say, it doesn't empty the recycle bin though, that's your job.

enfield_freddy

disk cleanup , and press the optional "system files" , this will get rid of years of updates that have loaded , takes a while tho ,,,

pendragon_arther

If you've done all above and it's still fairly full run some scans.

googler

arrallas wrote: »

Download Windirstat which is free. It takes a while to scan your hdd and then gives a graphical display of exactly how your drive is being used. This will help you decide which files you can safely delete.

Do this first. Then report back. It displays which are the file types using most space, how much space they're using, where they are, and all sorts of useful stuff.

poppellerant

I'd do a mixture of above, actually. Run Disk Cleanip and use the option to clean up system files. After that, run Windirstat to find out what's using your space.

There's no point looking at space used by junk files, when Disk Cleanup is going to clean them out for you anyway. Unless you want to do a before and after snapshot, in which case run Windirstat before then after Disk Cleanup.