Why is my hard drive so full?

[chakka35]

As one who never downloads high-capacity programs and who has always had masses of space on his hard drive I was astonished to discover today that with over 100,000 Mb used I have only 15 Mb left.

When I add up the size of my programs (in ADD/REMOVE) it comes to only 3500 Mb. Plainly lots of capacity must been going elsewhere - to the OS for example.

How can I look at everything on my HD so that I can discover where all this capacity is going? Thanks in advance.

[MarkRae]

First things first: download, install and run this: http://download.cnet....72&subj=dl&tag=button

and let it do its stuff.

What anti-malware software are you running?

[VHG]

Are you running any sort of backup program (or did you ever set one up)?

Could this be filling up your hard disk?

[woofgang]

windows, control panel computer then list files by size.

[Tuvok]

Take a look at the system restore settings - you might find that a large amount of space has been allocated - by default - to be used for system restore.

Alter the allocation and restart.

[deggers316]

i had this happen to me on my 100gb hard drive i had easus on my system and found out when i got the warning hard drive full, it had done 50gbs of back up, , i just deleted the folder, let it start again but now keep and eye on it

[cazzz1975]

remember as well windows updates take quite a chunk of disk space over a period of time

[chakka35]

Thanks, folks. Back home now and able to get down to it. Grateful to you all.

[chakka35]

I have a lot of emails in my INBOX and SENT. Are these stored on my hard drive or does my ISP keep them?

[factor-fiction]

I think the emails will account for only a tiny amount of space in the context of your figures

[methyl]

Please post what version of Microsoft Windows you are running:
Start/run/winver

Do check the figures first with Windows Explorer.
start/run/explorer ,
That is explorer-space-comma.
Look at the section "Hard Disk Drives" and report "Total Size" and "Free Space".
If you have some pop-up which reports wildly different figures, do run Malawarebytes as per post #1 if you have not done already.