Where are all the space in my computer?

[Jojoyee]

If drive C: has indicated 176 GB, probably there's no unallocated space in your hard disk and resizing is not needed.

Other than those wdhpr mentioned, check also if the Recycle Bin is emptied.

Give CCleaner (mentioned in Best Free File Cleaner) a try to free up space in the disk.

Hope this helps.

[bk_7312]

Try this, go to C: drive and press Ctrl + A to select all files and folders. If you see a pop-up saying there are hidden files, even if you didn't, go to the folder options and select 'Show hidden files' and untick 'Hide system files'. Remember to hide them afterwards. If there happen to be hidden files, they might be the reason for the 'loss' of space.

Hidden files are files that are hidden (hence the name) and they could be located anywhere. On your C: drive, there should be a hidden system folder named 'Recycled'. That is where all your deleted files go to. Yes, they go there after you delete files, so empty your recycling bin as Jojoyee suggested to free more space. There's also a folder named 'System Volume Information' on C: drive that holds system restore files which can be pretty big. So clean it up until the recent restore points as wdhpr suggested. These files can easily escape your notice and these files might be your 50GB gap.

Hope this helps

[Anupam]

There have been a lot of suggestions for you now... thanks to everyone who contributed. But, this can be quite confusing.

Lets keep things simple, and take things the easy and slow way, to avoid any mistakes.

Now, that you have told about your disk partitions, it should be clear that partition manager softwares are not needed for now.

The first partition EISA(Extended Industry Standard Architecture) should not be modified or deleted. This partition contains operating system files, and drivers, that are useful in case you need to restore your system in the case of any failure. It is used for system recovery... so you should definitely leave this partition alone, and not do anything with it.
From what you wrote about the partition details, it seems that this partition is empty. Its quite confusing to me. It should not be empty.

I am also not quite clear about the F: partition which is empty too.
Can you please take a screenshot of your Disk Management, and post it here... so that we can have a look for more better understanding.

Now, your C partition is having 176 GB, and this is the partition about which you are mainly concerned.

So, for this, first I would advise you to download CCleaner, which was suggested by Jojoyee too. This is a software, which cleans files which keep accumulating on the system as you work on it. These files are junk, or temporary, and not required by your system. Choose the default options of CCleaner, and just analyze and clean the files. This should free up a lot of space, if you have never used CCleaner before, on your system.
Please do not use the registry cleaner of CCleaner. Only the file cleaner with the default settings.

Then, after that, next step would be to use the software: WinDirStat, or TreeSize(Links to their sites given in earlier post). These will tell you in a graphical way, where the space of your hard disk is being used.

I think this is what you need to do for now. Reply back after doing this, and then we can take it further, if you still have more questions, or this does not solve your issue.

Then we can look at more complicated things like system restore files, or other things. Don't worry about them for now.

[Jojoyee]

Thanks Anupam for summing up.

Originally Posted by Anupam

The first partition EISA(Extended Industry Standard Architecture) should not be modified or deleted. This partition contains operating system files, and drivers, that are useful in case you need to restore your system in the case of any failure. It is used for system recovery... so you should definitely leave this partition alone, and not do anything with it.
From what you wrote about the partition details, it seems that this partition is empty. Its quite confusing to me. It should not be empty.

Probably this partition has been formatted

[Anupam]

Well, if that EISA partition has been formatted, then its serious, and needs to be looked into... because if any recovery CD has not been made of the laptop... then in case of a failure, it cannot be recovered back, and that's a problem. In that case, maybe the laptop needs servicing. Lets await an answer... and see what is real situation. A screenshot of Disk Management would help.

[kendall]

As I've posted before, another set of files taking up space are temporary files. CCleaner should find most of these. Please note, this works for XP, I don't know about Vista:

One little known secret for emptying temporary files is as follows:

Click on Start, and then Run.
Type %temp% (exactly as written. percent sign, temp, percent sign)
Click ok or run

What should show up is a list of all your current temporary files. I do this weekly. I then delete everything that is usually over 3 days old.

Another area for finding normally a lot of temporary files is C:\windows\temp. I usually try to check out this folder weekly as well.

P.S. A little side story--I get to my mother's house maybe once per year. While there, I try to do some annual computer-cleaning. I did the %temp% thing on her computer and found over 2000 temporary files that took up over 1 GB of space; most of which were well over 6 months old.

[wildman]

Being a person who believes in trying the simple things first, I would ask what are you trying to accomplish? If it is better performance, I would do a simple optimize with a good defrag program and clean up all the accumulated junk. CCleaner is a very good program to do just that. If you are not very knowledgeable, I would stay away with repartitioning my hard drive you can easily mess things up and cause yourself big problems and one major headache. Is it worth it?

Thanks
Wildman