Windows Vista - what the heck is eating up my drive space?

[stuman74]

It's actually my buddy's computer that I am trying to fix up. His hard drive, when looking at the local disk properties pie chart, says it's using 108gb of the 111gb space (120gb SSD).

But when in windows explorer, and with all hidden and system files shown, it's reporting out only using 41gb space. I cannot for the life of me figure out where the heck the extra 67gb of disk space is being used! No extra hidden partitions or drives or anything. Any ideas? Thanks!

 

[VirtualLarry]

I noticed that on one of my client's Vista / C2D machines, that I upgraded with 8GB of RAM and a 64GB SSD (they couldn't really afford bigger).

System Restore seemed to gobble up nearly all of the free space on the drive, for whatever reason.

 

[LTC8K6]

System restore.
Backups.
Recycle bin.
Giant page file.

 

[postmortemIA]

Run WinDirStat as admin

 

[stuman74]

Thanks for the suggestions. I am at work now, and not in front of it, and had looked at all of those except for running the WinDirStat. However, I was able to reduce it, and not sure why, when I toggled off the indexing on the drive. Doesn't make sense, but now the drive is reporting correctly!