C drive down to 5.09 GB's

[cupid01]

I have a Dell with windows 7 x64. When I bought it a little over 2 years ago it came installed with 298 GB's.
I checked this week how many GB's I had left on it and it said 242 GB's. I turned her on today clicked computer and noticed that the GB's went down to 5.09. It shows the bar is completely red and only 5.09 GB's left.

Can someone tell me what to do before I cant use it anymore.

Respectfully yours, Raymond Kiepprien
Email: [email protected]

EMail addy removed to prevent SPAM...

[Geek-9pm]

Welcome to Computer Hope.
At this point, you should reboot the computer  in safe mode.
Do you get error messages? What does it now report as drive space on C: ?

[Allan]

Download and run Treesize Free (http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/) and see where the space is being used. It may very well be a malware issue.

[lightsource]

Good call on TreeSize, very useful tool.

You might also want to run CCleaner (http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download) and clean up your temporary files and such - windows updates leaves behind installers, for example, that you should not need again; I've seen service pack installation files left on a hard drive that would pretty much take that much space.

[Carbon Dudeoxide]

I've got a neat little FAQ on how to clean up your computer:
http://www.computerhope.com/forum/index.php?topic=62253.0

It's been a while... It really needs updating...

... I'll get right on that!