Free disk space on hard drive decreasing for no reason

[tuxedomarty]

I DON'T have a virus, because I ran AdAware and Norton several times, and they haven't found any viruses, yet my hard drive space keeps decreasing slowly. I'm losing like a gigabyte every 5 minutes. I don't have a virus like I said! What's up with this?!

[aesling]

There are viruses that Norton or AdAware won't pick up. Try running Malwarebytes.

[DJ_Izumi]

http://windirstat.info/

You might find this useful to determine what's taking up all that space, malicious or not, it has to be in the file system somewhere.

[Kariudo]

Between windows updates, the various temporary folders that get generated by running programs, browser cache, etc... there will be some decrease over time...but not that much.

WinDirStat should help you tack down the source.

This reminds me of a logging problem that I was encountering with ZoneAlarm (firewall, the free one) a while back. I think the file was tvdebug.log, and I think it was eventually fixed in an update...that or I just turned off logging.

[Pwolf]

I forgot about WinDirStat... just figured out I had 11gigs worth of Skyrim saves >.> oops

[DJ_Izumi]

I forgot about WinDirStat... just figured out I had 11gigs worth of Skyrim saves >.> oops

WinDirStat is great for finding those huge things that you forgot about. "WTF? Why did I leave an interm 20GB Lagarith AVI file in d:\media\temp\new folder\ How long has this been here???"

Also great for "My GOD, my Steam games take up HOW MUCH? D:"

[Flint the Dwarf]

Wow, WinDirStat is awesome. Apparently music comprises most of my hdd, which isn't surprising, but it's cool to see everything in perspective. Diablo 3 already takes up more space than Skyrim, and it's not even released. :O

[Castor Troy]

Hold on, I only need to store my pr0n on your hard drive for a few more days.

[NeoQuixotic]

WinDirStat or other similar apps are great! I found out that Windows Media Player was creating thousands of duplicate thumbnails for music/images/videos that resided in the user library folders. It was like 8 GB of thousands of tiny thumbnails. After deleting them I had to use some crazy work around to prevent WMP from indexing the library folders, because if you delete it from the WMP library, it deletes the library folder itself.

As far as losing a gigabyte every 5 minutes; do you have any applications open when you notice this? Adobe apps like Photoshop and Premiere have temp files and/or generate additional cache files when importing/modifying media. Maybe you have an over aggressive backup program creating snapshots? If you're using Vista/7 the Resource Monitor and checking the disk tab might help when you notice it occuring.

[Flint the Dwarf]

I would suggest not using WMP. Get Foobar!