i recently bought a HP pavillion m7750n computer (AMD dual core 5200+, 2gb ram), with came with windows vista premium it has a 400gb hdd, which is plenty of space, but the problem is, whenever i download something, whether it be a 20mb file or a 2gb file, my hdd losses double to triple the space it says is required for example, i installed half life 2: lost coast which said required 325MB (sice i already had the main hl2 files already), i had 295gb free at the time, now i have 293gb i highlighted all my folders in my c:drive (including hidden files and folders) and it says it only has 19gb worth of files, while when i click on my C: drive, it says i have used over 70gb what can i do to stop using so much hdd space??? is this just a vista thing, or should i restore my comp using recovery (its only like a week old, so i dont have that much stuff) i could have downloaded something (like a virus), but i have ran both my spyware and virus software and found nothing
perhaps vista has hidden folders on the hd that are taking up the space... do you have hidden files set to visible?
Since it's such a significant change, there might be something wrong with your HD. Where did you buy your pc? Do you have warrenty?
actually guy i figured it out windows vista doesn't like to tell you that it reserves 15% of hdd space for system restore, so whenever i installed something (like half life 2) it would create another system restore point (which is REALLY big) it also doesn't help that the folder is completely hidden (even when show hidden files and folders is on) so 15% of my hdd is 60gb, and the system restore folder is only at about 55gb, so when it hits that, i wont loose huge chunks out of my drive space because it will overwrite old files thanks to everyone who replied