Disappearing hard drive space, can someone help?

[MarkA]

Hey folks, I find myself with a really weird problem here. Lately, my HD has been choking, loading furiously, sometimes even locking up completely and requiring a reboot. I have no idea what's going on, but I checked my HD an hour ago and found to my horror I was down to 21 megs of free space on a 5 gig HD. I think t hat may have been what was chocking my computer. Anyway, I am sure that all of this space shoudl not be filled, I just don't have that much space used up. Is there any easy way to tell if space is being wasted? Scandisc usually does it if I have this error before, but it's not picking up any troubles. Neither is my virus scanner. Is there any other way to see if HD space is being filled unecessarily?

[Susan]

21 Megs left will choke Windows. I'm surprised you got past 100.

You have a 5 Gig HD? You must have alot of programs installed to fill it. Do you have the drive partitioned?

[Dash800]

Check the *.chk files in C:\. And Windows might be making an oversized Swapfile, so look in Control Panels, System, Performance, Virtual Memory, i Manage my own at i think 250megs as a static Swap.

[LJE2]

What OS are you using, if you are using Win 95B or C, or Win 98, and your drive is partitioned FAT 16, then partitioning it to FAT 32 could help you, but you definatly need more free space for Windows to operate efficiently (well that's going under the assumption that Window's is efficient)

[ENVY]

Run disk defrag,this should help you recover that missing HD space.

[Mntsnow]

Mark,
I would first do as Dash800 has suggested concerning *.CHK files (delete them) (when ever windows crashes and "loses" where files go it writes them to CHK files....it doesnt take long to fill up a harddrive with those files...I would also check your TEMP folder(empty it) and also empty your internet "cache" folder. Then do as Envy mentioned and do a scandisk and then a defrag.

Mntsnow

[cracker099]

hey markA ....i had the same problem. I found out that photoshop 4 was the culprit. If you scratch disk on, your hard drive will fill up preety quick. Check your manuel for more info.