Mystery GBs taking up Hard Drive...?

[healeycj]

Hey all,

Like a week ago I got my brand new Dell Inspiron 1420 in midnight blue (LOVE it)
with windows Vista as the OS.

Well When I got it my C-drive showed that I had about 210 or 220 Gb of free space. Well for some reason it is now saying I have 171 Gb of 220 Gb - THATS 40 GB!!!

There is NO WAY I could have installed 40 Gb of stuff on my computer in a week. I never went past 40 Gb on my old 80gb computer and that was with movies and like 2,000 songs etc

So I went and checked what files I had on the hard drive (I had burnt some Dvd but I had deleted the files afterwards but I thought I'd check anyway). I did a search for every file created since the date I got the Laptop and highlighted them all and right-clicked and went to properties...
As I expected about 700mbs of stuff (mostly music)

So I decided I actually see what else could be taking up the space. I went into my C drive and I found the size of all the root folders in there and added them together.

I got only 13GB

The computer also has a 10 Gb back-up partition on it but that was there when I first got the Pc aswell so it should have made much difference.

Can someone tell me where the extra 27Gb of data are hiding or indeed why I can't find them?

Thanks Heaps!
Chris :-)

[AnnMarie]

Hi Chris, System Restore might be the culprit. Try turning off System Restore, reboot and see if you regain the space. You will lose your restore points so make sure that you turn it back on again afterwards and create a new restore point. See here for more help.