Where does all the drive space go

[red-adair]

Have been ripping/compressing and copying for a while now and everything is going good, however...only havin a 40GB HDD have been deleting the ripped/compressed files as soon I've burned them to disc so as not to slow the pc down. The problem is that even though I'm deleting the files I keep losing HDD space, have tried disc cleanup/defrag/temp files but cannot locate where I'm losing space???? any suggestions :confused:

[Hiro2k]

Do you have norton installed?? If you do you should clean out some of the files it keeps for "Recovery". I noticed that too and I was like WTF??? And then I found those system files and there were like 2 gigs of old files which I never wanted to see again!

That could be one cause, another is that sometimes informations on the hard drive are stored accross different sectors, but it doesn't fill the sector. So what you have is alot of files spread over the disk that are not using the space as efficienlty as it could be, and are thus sucking up the space. Defragmenting moves those files and allocates them better, but it won't really make a huge difference.

[red-adair]

Thanks, am running norton so will have a look and see what I can find:rolleyes:

[2COOL]

I concur with Hiro2K.

Just right click on your Norton Protected Recycle Bin and select in order...

Empty Recycle Bin
Empty Norton Protected Files

This is what I do. You can also bypass the the regular Recycle Bin by holding the shift key when deleting.