something is taking up space on my HD and i don't know what ...i know i don't have 13GB worth of stuff installed ...and the size of my "Program Files" folder is only 2.5gb maybe this will help: thanks in advance.
Have you checked your temp file directory? I've seen 8GB files in there before, presumably from aborted installs or something.
Same thing happened to me and it turned out i had got bout 22GB in recycle bin (its shift + del for me now )
Right-click on the drive and select disk cleanup. Might find any leftovers you missed... You did check the recycle bin right? Is it an OEM machine, with a separate partition for system restore?
other than temp files and such there are a few major things that can take up disc space. first you want to make sure that the recycling bin isn;t taking up too much space, it defaults to something like 10% of the drive so with a big drive that could be a lot more than you need. right click on it and go into properties, it should be pretty straight forward from there. the next is the pagefile. if you have a lot of ram you don't need a big pagefile. mine defaults to around 1.5g but i have a gig of ram so i set it down around 3-400, anything lower than that and windows will bitch at you at random times, don't ask why. the third is system restore, this can also take up a lot of space. goto start>settings>control panel>system>sytem restore. one thing i will say is if you do turn it off make sure you back up important stuff frequently, you never know when windows will decide to freak out on you. the last is hybernation. for this, right click on desktop>screen saver>power>hybernation. go ahead and turn that off, thats another gig or so. another basic thing is go through your program files and make sure there isn't stuff leftover from programs you've uninstalled, a lot of programs, games especially, have a habbit of not cleaning out most of their stuff.
