Quickly Losing Hard Drive Free Space

[HoustonMI]

About three years ago I purchased a Dell XPS 8100 computer with a 1000 gigabyte hard drive, Windows 7 Home Premium with an Intel Core i7 CPU.  Until recently, this computer has performed wonderfully and I've always had approximately 850 gigabytes of free space.

 A month ago, in one day, the free space decreased by about 90 gigabytes.  Yesterday, in approximately 12 hours, it decreased by another 110 gigabytes.  I've not downloaded anything out of the ordinary during this time, as I mainly use this computer for emailing and surfing.  The Dell site checks indicate all hardware is okay (although at one point it said "Unexpected Error Occurred"), and checks by Microsoft Security Essentials, Malwarebytes, SpywareBlaster and Spybot indicates all is well.

I will definitely appreciate suggestions.

[Geek-9pm]

Hard to say. This sort of thing has been reported by others.
Here is a search on the CH archives.
loss of free space

Sorry I can not give even a good guess. May I suggest you look at your backup plan.You may have to do some kind of recovery that might damage some files.

[Calum]

Give Windirstat a try, to see where the space is being used.  It's not perfect but may help point you in the right direction.
Have you installed any software or made any changes to the computer recently?

Sorry I can not give even a good guess.  You may have to do some kind of recovery that might damage some files.

Well that's not vague.

[HoustonMI]

I installed WinDirStat and it showed that Google Earth was using 139.8 GBs!  I checked around and learned that the most recent version of Google Earth has - and is - doing the same thing with the computers of many other people.  It has something to do with the way the new version of GE saves info.  Deleting Google Earth didn't bring back all the gigabytes I lost, but did bring back about two-thirds of them.  We have to delete the GE cache before uninstalling Google Earth; otherwise, the same problem will supposedly be there if we should choose to download the program again at a later date.  Google says it has corrected the problem, but it seems there are many people who disagree with that.

Revo Uninstaller is a great program for uninstalling programs and is much more thorough than the Windows built-in program.

[Calum]

Interesting.  It may well be that uninstalling Google Earth has left behind some of its temporary files, cache, etc, so I would recommend giving CCleaner a try.  CCleaner, if you're not familiar with it, is a tool to remove junk files, including temporary files and those left over from uninstalled programs.  Revo is more thorough than the Windows uninstaller but it's worth giving CCleaner a go regardless.