Hard Drive Shows as full but its not...

[Accolade83]

My friend is having a problem with her new laptop that I can seem to figure out. She was complaining that her new HP g60-519wm laptop had a full hard drive already. I knew this couldn't possibly be true because it has something like a 240GB hard drive and she had barely used it. She brought it over and sure enough it showed only 7gb free on the main partition. I started looking thru it checking the size of each individual folder to try and pinpoint what was taking up the space until I reached a problem. Apparently C:\Users\Admin is taking up 178gb of space. But once inside the folder is basically EMPTY... No folder in that entire area is bigger than 75mb and all but one are empty. Huh? How is this possible? The trail goes cold... I ran a hard drive check through the hp diagnostics thing in the cmos and it passed. Is there a fix to this other than restoring the computer? I'm sure there is a lot of info you guys might need to help answer this question that I'm not providing and for that I apologize, I just don't ever have to use forums to find help often so I'm kinda rusty. But anything you need I'll try and provide if you ask for it. I appreciate any help or suggestions anyone can provide. Thanks. 

[Geek-9pm]

new HP g60-519wm laptop

You need to contact the store where you bought this.
Right away.
These  are selling like hot cakes. You want a emplacement.

[BC_Programmer]

You need to contact the store where you bought this.
Right away.
These  are selling like hot cakes. You want a emplacement.

what? how is that helpful?



Can you view hidden files within that folder? Is she signing in using this particular account?  Vista's administrator account is called... well, "administrator" not admin, so you could try deleting the account entirely, if it's not being used.

[Quantos]

It's probably VSS taking up an inordinate amount of space.  Here is a good article on it with information on limiting Volume Shadow Copy.

[Accolade83]

Can you view hidden files within that folder? Is she signing in using this particular account?  Vista's administrator account is called... well, "administrator" not admin, so you could try deleting the account entirely, if it's not being used.

Well I'm having a "duh" moment... I forgot to mention (newb mistake) that this laptop uses windows 7. This is still fairly new to me and somewhere as I was troubleshooting this problem I thought to myself "I need to find the folder options and make the hidden files visible" but somewhere in my meandering and trying to find the folder options and exploring other various ideas... I simply forgot. That is, of course, until you pointed it out. I made them visible, and sure enough the problem was in a hidden folder for Azureus (sp?). Anyway it has now been taken care of. And I thank you both, BC_Programmer and Quantos, for your helpfulness. Consider this problem solved!

Thanks again! 

[Salmon Trout]

the problem was in a hidden folder for Azureus

A bit torrent client... Someone getting greedy... 178 GB!!!

[BC_Programmer]

A bit torrent client... Someone getting greedy... 178 GB!!!

my downloads folder is 317 GB... 

[Salmon Trout]

my downloads folder is 317 GB... 

My BT folder is 12 GB and my usenet one is 15 GB... Mind you, directly I have downloaded something, I generally move it somewhere else. My Newsbin total downloads figure reads 2028 GB. I started using the program in September 2006.

[BC_Programmer]

yeah, and truth be told, a good amount of the crap in my downloads folder is so unorganized I've downloaded them multiple times because I gave up looking and was unable to think of enough of the name to find it.

[Salmon Trout]

Since my cable service got to 20 Mb I have tended to get lazy and just download stuff again. Since I got a DVD player that has a USB socket and plays AVIs and MPGs I burn much less.