[gui-talk] Mysterious Low Free Space on HD

[Baracco, Andrew W]

I am using a 5 year old Dell notebook PC running Windows XP Media Center
Edition.  It has a 100 GB HD.  Because I keep just about all of my
content on external HD's, the HD is only about half full.  That was,
until about a week ago.  When a 100 MD download was about to conclude, I
got a Disk Cleanup dialogue that said that the download would abort
because there was not enough free space on the HD.  Sure enough, when I
checked the properties of the drive, it was just about full.  I ran a
disk cleanup and defrag, and recovered about 16 GB of the space, but the
next day it was gone again.  I examined the folders on the drive, and
can't find anything that shouldn't be there.  Successive runs of disk
cleanup were of little help, and I can't even defrag now because there
isn't enough free space.  Antivirus and antimalware scans say that the
system is clean.  I have IE set to delete temp internet files on exit.
I don't know what else to do.  My neighbor, who is a tech, and who helps
me with PC problems doesn't want to touch this one with a ten foot pole.
Does anyone have any idea of what's going on, and what can be done?

 

Andy