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Hard Drive missing...space?

Chases Street DemonsChases Street Demons Registered User regular
edited August 2009 in Moe's Stupid Technology Tavern
My desktop is about two years old now. It's got a pathetically teensy little hard drive, the sort of hard drive that gets sand kicked on it at the beach. It's weighs in at a whopping 60 gig! O-o

So, essentially I find myself limited to one or two games at a time on the HD, which is fine for now, until I decide to upgrade it.

The problem I'm encountering is that windows (xp) is telling me that the drive is almost full, but for the life of me I can't find out what's taking up the drive space. When I go to add/remove programs, I've got two programs total that are over 1gig.

I became suspicious last week when I got back into planetside with their free readmission. I downloaded and played it, but then got bored and decided I wanted to try the Crimecraft beta. So I go to download it: not enough space. No problem, I'll uninstall Planetside. Except I did just that and my C drive didn't recognize any more free space. Planetside's gone, but I've still got a full hard drive.

I need suggestions. I dumped the recycle bin (nothing of value) and cleared out my browser stuff (again, nothing of value). Then I went to run a disk defrag, but as I'm sure most of you know, it needs 15% drive space free to finish. So Defragging isn't working either.

What am I missing? How do I find this mystery C drive space? Is there something I should be deleting that I'm missing? At this point I'll take any advice I can get. I'm by no means a tech person and I've exhausted my feeble bag of tricks.

Thanks!

"Sometimes things aren't complicated," I said. "You just have to be willing to accept the absolute corruption of everybody involved."

Chases Street Demons on

Posts

  • DarmakDarmak RAGE vympyvvhyc vyctyvyRegistered User regular
    edited August 2009
    Try using spacemonger, it should tell you exactly what is on your harddrive.

    edit: here's the old, free version.

    Darmak on
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  • ASimPersonASimPerson Cold... ... and hard.Registered User regular
    edited August 2009
    WinDirStat is also nice.

    ASimPerson on
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  • ronyaronya Arrrrrf. the ivory tower's basementRegistered User regular
    edited August 2009
    How big is "C:\Documents and Settings" on your computer?

    ronya on
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  • Chases Street DemonsChases Street Demons Registered User regular
    edited August 2009
    ronya wrote: »
    How big is "C:\Documents and Settings" on your computer?


    I'm not home right now, but I'll check and post when I can.

    Chases Street Demons on
    "Sometimes things aren't complicated," I said. "You just have to be willing to accept the absolute corruption of everybody involved."

  • Chases Street DemonsChases Street Demons Registered User regular
    edited August 2009
    ronya wrote: »
    How big is "C:\Documents and Settings" on your computer?

    Finally got a chance to do this. It weighs in at 27.5 Gig.

    Edit: I just used spacemonger and all KINDS of stuff that I thought was deleted was still lurking. LotRO, WoW, WAR, even Fallout3....but none of these programs had been showing up in my add or remove programs window. Thanks for the help, I feel like a tard though. How is someone who just wants to play games and isn't into the tech side of these things supposed to know that these things aren't really leaving my hard drive?

    Chases Street Demons on
    "Sometimes things aren't complicated," I said. "You just have to be willing to accept the absolute corruption of everybody involved."

  • ronyaronya Arrrrrf. the ivory tower's basementRegistered User regular
    edited August 2009
    Many games keep their files in multiple locations, so beware. WoW for instance puts its main stuff in "C:\program files\..." but puts patches in "C:\documents and settings\...". This latter can be very large.

    Start>Run "%appdata%", and poke around (but be careful).

    ronya on
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  • DedianDedian Registered User regular
    edited August 2009
    A lot of times even when you remove a program through add/remove, the data you created (saves, temp files, whatever a game/program creates in documents & settings) will remain. There's sometimes an option in the uninstall to remove this data as well, but it usually just sits around until you do something with it.

    Edit: there's also Tree Size Free, http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml, gives you a little different view (I prefer it to the complex boxes :D)

    Dedian on
  • StormwatcherStormwatcher Blegh BlughRegistered User regular
    edited August 2009
    yeah, never trust "add/remove programs".

    winDirStat looks cool, but tree size is much more easy to understand. both are useful.

    Stormwatcher on
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