[gui-talk] Mysterious Low Free Space on HD

[David Andrews]

This exact thing happened to me about a year ago.  I had a computer, 
not a Dell, and the hard drive would fill up completely.  I would 
painstakingly create space on it, and it would fill up again the next 
day.  Couldn't find viruses, malware etc.  I never got to the bottom 
of it -- it was time for computer replacement anyway, which is what happened.

Sorry I don't have any magic ideas.

Dave

At 10:11 AM 2/14/2012, you wrote:
>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