My computer is eating up hard drive memory?

3 thoughts on “My computer is eating up hard drive memory?”

1. raina_vissora says:

   January 5, 2011 at 2:10 pm

   The easiest way to figure out what’s eating up all your disk space would be to run a disk space analyzer like WinDirStat. It will at least give you an idea on where to look.

   http://windirstat.info/

   The most likely cause is that your OS or a program is running some sort of recurring backup that you’re not aware of… which is where the analyzer comes in handy, as, if that’s the case, it shouldn’t have any problem finding the backups for you (which in turn ought to tell you what program is making them).

   Another possibility is that there’s something recording on your computer (webcam, microphone, keylogger, etc.)

2. Tomba53 says:

   January 5, 2011 at 2:10 pm

   Well, double check and make sure your webcam isn’t stuck in record mode. It happened to me a few times where it’d be on and start recording as soon as my computer booted up for whatever reason.

   Outside of that, I’m not really sure what’s going on. I do know it wouldn’t be caused by upgrading to IE8. Browsers aren’t really a memory hog.

   Just a shot in the dark here, maybe your drive became corrupted and the partitions are all messed up? Again, just a guess.

3. Tempo.One says:

   January 5, 2011 at 2:10 pm

   Windows is constantly creating files for its own use. This can eat up a lot of hard drive storage space.

   System Volume Information files, (the files that are used when performing a System Restore) by default in XP can use up to 12% of your free hard drive space.

   And your hiberfil.sys file…those are the ones that bring your machine out of Hibernation can easily run 1.5 GB or more.

   Also if your downloading your e-mail to a local e-mail client like Outlook Express, that’s even more used hard drive space.

   Honestly, I don’t think this is at all abnormal. But if you really need the extra hard drive space, you can manually reduce the default System Restore size and turn off hiberfil.sys…..Google is you best friend in this case.

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