Help! Losing OS space

[jonflaherty]

My main drive space is dangerously low and keeps filling up for no apparent reason. It is a 64 GB SSD I mostly use for OS and a couple applications. I ran WinDirStat as some people suggested but it only identifies 43.6 GB full. I already unhid files. It has been filling up over the last few days. I run windows Vista. It MIGHT be related to Lightroom 4 as it seems to have started around the same time I installed that app. Any help and ideas for next step will be very much appreciated. See attached screenshots. Thanks,
Jon

 

[theevilsharpie]

It looks like your disk space is being chewed up by WinSxS. You can try to reduce that a bit by uninstalling libraries and frameworks that aren't needed (older versions of .Net, Silverlight, older C++ redistributables, etc.).

.ORC files also seem to be consuming a large amount of disk space. Investigate where these files are stored to see if they're legitimate.

The disk space that WinDirStat can't account for is probably being used by Windows System Protection.

If you need to clean up a bunch of disk space quickly, install and run CCleaner.

 

[yinan]

Is hibernate enabled? That can eat space easily on a drive.

 

[sm625]

I'm pretty sure that big green blob is hiberfil.sys.

Go into your partition manager and find out if there is another partition, and if so, what is on it. Also you should do a disk cleanup and remove all but the most recent restore point. And go into backup and see if you have any backup images or files, and where it is storing them.

 

[jonflaherty]

Fixed. Wish I could tell you how. CCleaner didn't find much...maybe 750mb, I had already been using the windows cleaner. I uninstalled silverlight since I had recently installed that even though it claimed it didn't take up much space. I also disabled hibernate, used the windows cleaner to delete restore points and ran the windows cleaner (it said it only cleaned another few hundred meg). I didn't think anything I was doing was having an effect but when I checked my HD space I had 19GB free, so it was clearly one of those things I did
Thanks for the advice!
Jon

 

[yinan]

It was more than likely disabling hibernation. The hibernation file is equal to the amount of RAM in your system.

 

[gmaster456]

Like the above user said. It was probably hibernation causing the issues.