Before doing a Win 7 rebuild, I have cloned the whole current drive to an empty one using Acronis. The new drive has a lot of free space, whereas the original one was 90% full and understandably unhappy. I have run it for a couple of days, booted from the clone, and the drives seem to have changed in how much they contain. The old 'full' drive now has about 170GB free, and the new one has about the same amount more on it. Is this the Swap file or some other windows housekeeping? It's a long time since I looked at swap files etc, and certainly not on Win 7.
Nothing Windows based would use 170GB, a full install would only use around 20-30GB. Is it possible you have moved something like your Steam library, Movie/Music collection?
Thanks Corky, all I did was clone the drive and then boot from the clone. I have not started to do any tidying yet, and was surprised the next day when the drives were more full and emptier than the day before! I will put the new one on another PC and see what the contents look like. Could it be something nasty running? May have to do a clean install and copy the data.
I've not used one myself but maybe you could try checking the drive with a disc space analyser, I've heard people recommend WinDirStat in the past, maybe worth checking the drive with that, or another disc space analyser if someone has a better recommendation.
Thanks for that recommendation, never seen it before. Just had a quick sniff, and it's incredible, all my stuff laid out in boxes - very visual and works well with the way I see things. Cheers.
Sorry, was a quick post from work while I should have been busy doing something else ............ Here's the link in case it still helps anyone: http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=276872
