Hard drive on laptop is over half full

[RGR]

I had to run recovery on my laptop and it took me back to when it was bought,with
windows XP home pro edition w/sp2 and thats ok everything seems to be working fine.
  But before recovery i had xp pro edition /wsp2, now the question,
Is there a way to tell if XP pro is still on my laptop also?
because when I run defrag it shows 60% of my 70 gig hard drive is used up, and I have not added anything yet.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

[soybean]

windows XP home pro edition w/sp2

What does that mean, Windows XP  Home Edition or Windows XP Pro?  There is no "home pro edition".

Open My Computer.  How many drives/partitions are shown there?  What size are they?

[patio]

Open My Computer and click on Help/About Windows and it will tell you...
Because you did a restore you need to grab all the Windows all over again from Windows Update.

I have heard this method does make the installation larger...do me a favor Open Explorer and right click the WinNT folder and select properties...this will report what size it is...

[RGR]

I'm sorry this is XP home edition w/sp2
I went to explorer help and to system info and it show's just the 1 edition so I guess
thats not what is taking up my space. But I did notice my memory of 512.00 mgb is now 129.01 mgb's so I must have something taking up to much memory.

[daniel1212]

Memory is different than drive space.  You will have to answer the above questions in order to better diagnose this.  In discovering where space goes, one little safe add on that i have often found very useful is Folder Size, which adds add size to the context menu when you right click and hit Properties. You can  reorganize them by size in  the listings. Will not work on Vista. http://rotebetasoftware.net/wp/freeware/folder-size/

My XP drive is 15GB, without document/music/video files, with the largest single space takers being the hiberfil.sys (needed for hibernation) and the I386 folder (system backup files).

[RGR]

I don't see any questions to answer. But I'm not too good at this computer stuff so sorry if I seem 
But I did run "folder size" nice view of my usage realy surprised  found 28.76 GB in My backup is there any way to remove this and create a new backup

[daniel1212]

Sorry for not getting back to you,  i had a lot of irons in  the fire. And no need to apologize, as we all began as newbies and i have much to learn as well.   

The questions were,  Open Windows Explorer (hold down the Windows key and tap the E key and let both go)  and see how many drives/partitions are shown there. What size are they? (go to View up top and click on Details).  Then and navigate in the C drive and right click on the WinNT folder and select properties...this will report what size it is.

As for your last question, (i assume that you are indeed speaking about your XP backup and not the System Restore files), it does sound this that is the answer to your space problem, and you can delete the backup, but it may be that you have only one backup, that being your entire C drive.  In any case, i would recommend you save at least your personal files somewhere first.  You can then  go to Start> Programs>Accessories>System Tool and launch Backup (or, hold Windows key and tap R key, type ntbackup.exe and hit enter).  Then  choose  Advance Mode and hit the Restore and Manage tab up the top, right click on the backup and choose Delete catalog.  Then  check your space again in Explorer (press the F5 key to refresh the window).

You can also delete all the System Restore points except the last one by right clicking on your C drive, then hit Properties and then Disk cleanup and then the More Options tab up the top.  System Restore is down  the bottom.   

I would recommend that you buy an external hard drive if you can, or an external enclosure to put a spare drive in, and that way you can just plug it in  the USB and backup files to there.