My free hard drive space seems to fluctuate too much

[DaJe]

Last night it was like 148GB free or something like that. And then about 3 hours ago it said 127GB free. Now, I refreshed my Computer folder, and the free space on my hard drive has dropped to 122GB free. Any ideas what might be causing these rapid and seemingly random changes in space?

[Crazy Buddhist]

If you are running Vista I would suggest a bug yet to be fixed is to blame most likely.

If not it could be something you are doing.

Failing that the Russian Mafia may have a porn server stashed on your HDD.

[DaJe]

I've been running Vista for months though, with no problems. It now says 121GB. I guess this should probably be in the Fix It Shop though.

[Crazy Buddhist]

Have you tried the old 'disk clean up and defrag' routine to see what results?

[DaJe]

I've defragmented it, using Diskeeper. I actually have it set to run on auto defrag, so whenever it can get some idle resources, it'll defrag a little. I didn't try to cleanup though.

[Dilphat]

Failing that the Russian Mafia may have a porn server stashed on your HDD.

that can also be a good possibility. you never know when a teenage hacker gets into your system and can turn it into a spam bot. we were just talking about that a few weeks ago in school. check to make sure the ports you need are open, and the ones you don't are closed. you just never know now a days.

[Crazy Buddhist]

that can also be a good possibility. you never know when a teenage hacker gets into your system and can turn it into a spam bot. we were just talking about that a few weeks ago in school. check to make sure the ports you need are open, and the ones you don't are closed. you just never know now a days.

indeed I was not entirely joking. Best place to test is at Gibson Research Corporation (http://www.grc.com/) using their "Shield'sUP" test:

ShieldsUP! (https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2)55,045,050 system testsThe Internet's quickest, most popular, reliable and trusted, free Internet security checkup and information service. And now in its Port Authority Edition, it's also the most powerful and complete. Check your system here, and begin learning about using the Internet safely.

Steve Gibson is a programming and security king.

[DaJe]

Russians, eh. They're just mad that I completely pwnt them in the World in Conflict demo.



So anyways, I used ShieldsUp now, and I completely passed on every single port and every single part on every single test.

[Crazy Buddhist]

Russians, eh. They're just mad that I completely pwnt them in the World in Conflict demo.

So anyways, I used ShieldsUp now, and I completely passed on every single port and every single part on every single test.

loooooooool@pwnt

Reassuring your clear on that front. I check every machine weekly. It sometimes throws things up. One ISP I was with sent me a modem offering ftp telnet and http ports to the whole web by default so they could 'maintain the modem' - what an invite for trouble.

back OT:

googling this throws up a lot of info about Vista system restore and backups gobbling disk space. I will see if I can find something concrete during the day.

AND yes this would be good in fix it. I hear Bucko coming over the hill on his trusty charger :)

[DaJe]

And now the free space is back up to 143GB. I do have a backup that's about 37GB, but I have it compressed. And that's a backup of XP and all the files I had on XP.

[XcOM]

vista system restore makes a backup every so often, or when an event triggers it, after so much tme it deletes the old resore information,

this happened on XP, but was never noticed as it used so little space compaied to vista.

[simon275]

Yeah I was thinking either backups or maybe there is something stuffed up with the pagefile and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger until the computer is restarted.

[DaJe]

I don't shut down this computer. And speaking of the paging file, the Master File Table is 977MB.

[Crazy Buddhist]

I don't shut down this computer. And speaking of the paging file, the Master File Table is 997MB.

You could try an experiment and next time you notice the issue see what a reboot does to it.

[DaJe]

The power went out for a few seconds earlier this week. Once I turned the computer back on, the hard drive was still 106GB (it's now at like 140GB). I did notice somethingjust now though. When I open up the start menu, "Backup and Restore Center" is on there, like it's been recently used.

[Bopher]

Welcome to the Twilight Zone...... Where the undead rise and mess with your computer. Stupid undead always making backup on the computer.

[xRyokenx]

Just thinking, your PC could have worms... might wanna take it to the vet so it doesn't die... wait a sec... actually, scratch "The Vet," that guy's an idiot, go to a non-superhero named one or just get an antivirus.

[DaJe]

Well I know this thread is sort of old now, but I think I just figured it out. It was an assumption I had before, but I never acted on it until now. I noticed that the "backup and recovery center" would appear on my start menu, as if it had been recently used. So in the disk cleanup, I just deleted every restore point except for the most recent. I gained about 30GB of space.

[XcOM]

vista system restore makes a backup every so often, or when an event triggers it, after so much tme it deletes the old resore information,

this happened on XP, but was never noticed as it used so little space compaied to vista.

need i say more,

Glad you solved it though dude, this is why i have system restore didabled, not just disabled, it dosen't exist, XP never knew it ever existed!

[Scotty]

I figured it was doing it on mine about 1 week ago too. Along with updates, just randomly updated them half my drivers stopped working =\