Nedd help with disappearing Hard Drive Space

Wasabi

Right, first off this is for a laptop with WinXP and service pack 2.

Of other significance is that this may be tied into some torrenting.

Here's the background.
This laptop has a fairly small Hard drive, so once I got the internet there was only about 6gigs of 38 left.
Once I got the internet at the house here I also bought an external hard drive for downloads and extra files.

I just noticed the problem I'm having last night. I noticed that the free space on my laptop was very low (around 1 gig) so I went in and cleaned out temporary files and old programs - I ended up with about 6.7gigs left.

I ran windows' defrag and disk cleanups and installed the newest windows security update.

I also made an update to Peer Gaurdian2. It started giving me pop-ups about an unexpected exception occurring, I'd never seen this before and there were many of them so I wiped and re-installed that, those warnings went away.

At any rate, I do use utorrent and overnight I had left it running with two downloads, though they were both pretty slow (maybe 30kbps on one and about 10kbps on the other). Also I put my torrents straight onto my external. With such little space on the laptop I've never dl'd anything of significant size onto it.

When I got up this morning there was again only about 1.9 gigs of free space. I was pretty confused, then throughout the day it slowly shrank, and eventually there was 0 space left.
I turned off utorrent and restarted the computer, and now it tells me have only 300mgs left

I use a free version of AVG and I've been pretty lucky with being missed by viruses...right now as far as I can tell I just have a few "warnings" in the way of tracking cookies...nothing serious and no viruses.

I don't know whats going on - lemme know if you need anymore details...I could really use the help.

Is there a way to see new files, or sort through objects by size?

TL DR

If you're able, it might be a good idea to install your laptop's hard drive in another computer, and use that machine to run a virus scan with fully updated AVG.
Otherwise, Spacemonger will help you find what is using all your space.

wakkawa

Try clearing out your temp files. It should be something like
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temp
I only say this because I found like 8 gigs of shit in there a week or so ago.

proXimity

Something like this is usually caused by an out of control log file of some type. I recommend WinDirStat to check out where all your space is going. I haven't used Spacemonger (as recommended above), but at least WinDirStat has the advantage of being free.

Scooter

Peer Guardian seems to require a lot more space than it seems like it should, though I've never seen it continually eat up space.

Wasabi

Thanks for the tips guys, I'll try 'em out and report back with the results

Azio

Windows will automatically fill up to 15% of your disk with System Restore points. To delete them:

Start>All Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Disk Cleanup

Select C: drive and press OK

Go to More Options tab

Under System Restore click Clean Up

To prevent this from happening again, right-click on My Computer, go to Properties, then under System Protection disable System Restore.

Wasabi

Oh.man.


I dl'd spacemonger there just cause it was the first suggestion. After a quick scan I discovered Peer Guardian, a very small program by itself, had gotten out of control with its archiving and had rapidly ballooned to nearly 17gigs by itself.
I deleted the unnecessary logs and histories and figured out how to keep it under control.

Thanks so much for the help everyone