hard drive is getting filled up?

[Agalloch]

I recently got a new HP Pavilion a1700n with a 250GB hard drive. It's formated down to 226GB, and when I first got it, it had about 208GB free space. I installed AIM, Yahoo browser, iTunes, Spysweeper and Norton antivirus, and I copied no more than 6 GB's of music from CD's and my mp3 player, and the hard drive only has 179GB's left. I have no idea how so much space could have been taken up.  :-?

[patio]

System Restore points if this is XP...

[CBMatt]

Agreed.  If you're running XP, then that sounds about right for System Restore points.  Is XP your OS?

[Agalloch]

No, Vista.

[soybean]

You might check your virtual memory settings, too.  That gets included in the total space used, at least by Win XP.

[Agalloch]

ok, now i have 167GB's. I haven't downloaded anything, or installed anything, I just ran norton anti-virus, and spysweeper, and nothing came up. There was a HP auto-update but that couldn't have taken up 8 gig's

[soybean]

You might [highlight]check your virtual memory settings[/highlight], too.  That gets included in the total space used, at least by Win XP.

[Agalloch]

how do I do that?

[kwfine]

System Restore points if this is XP...

oh, I didn't know that the XP's system restore function takes up so much space!
It seems the restore system needs around 10% of the total HDD space.

Thanks, patio!

[soybean]

how do I do that?

Right click on My Computer, select Properties, select the Advanced tab, click on Settings, select the Advanced tab, and click on Change, under Virtual memory.  What do you see there?  Since a manual setting here is generally based on how much RAM you have, how much RAM do you have?

[CBMatt]

You could also download a program like JDiskReport to see what's taking up memory/space.  Warning: a full-system scan will take quite awhile to perform, so while you wait, you might want to go make a sandwich...or six.