My laptop kept overheating and snapping off. Among other things I checked the hard drive free space. I had less than 600 MB free [out of 37.2G capacity]. I started deleting things and moving things onto a flash drive. I found a two-year old file backup put on my computer by a Norton tech. I deleted it and freed up over a 1GB of space. The laptop still kept overheating, but at least I had that 1GB+ of free space.
In the past few days I had about 2 days of blissfully long computer sessions, fooling around with my files and searching the net. I added very little to my files and haven't knowingly downloaded any programs. Then I got a message for Microsoft Security Essentials saying a new version was available. I downloaded it, installed it, did a quick scan - and my computer overheated and snapped off. After letting it cool I turned it on and checked the hard drive capacity. I'm back down to less than 900 MB of space. I've checked the Installed Programs and there's nothing I don't recognize, and MS Security Essentials certainly doesn't take up a gig. Is there some other place I'm supposed to look to find out what's clogging my hard drive?
By the way, I couldn't think what to name this post. Saying the space was mysteriously taken up makes it sound like it was taken up in a UFO.
