What’s is taking up all my storage?

Q  I bought a new laptop just a few months ago. At the time, the 300GB capacity of my hard disk drive seemed ample but recently, I noticed that I was down the last few gigabytes of spare storage.

Admittedly I have installed a lot of programs since buying it but most of these are small utilities (often prompted by ideas seen in Computeractive’s Workshops section). I’ve used Windows Explorer to browse through the hard disk’s content for culprits and it doesn’t seem that I have that many of my own documents and photos on the hard disk.

Do you have any idea what might be taking up all the space or recommend a quick and easy way to find out?
Norman Stevens

A  We have no clue what’s taking up all the space but we would be suspicious of the work folders of any video-editing or virtualisation tools you may have.

Video clips consume hard disk space, so if you have been making home movies check to see what’s stored in the folders related to the software involved: it’s possible that historical edits have been ferreted away somewhere.

Similarly, while virtualisation software – such as Microsoft’s Virtual PC – isn’t in itself a big space hog, the ‘image’ files of virtual computers created within it can quickly balloon to tens of gigabytes.

Either way, we’d recommend using some specialist software in order to pinpoint the perpetrator.

A free program called Disk Space Fan, for example, will scan the hard disk and allows you to search for the biggest space hogs. We explained how to use Disk Space Fan in the Workshops section of issue 325, so you might even have it installed already.