Hard Drive Free Space keeps changing

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
G

Guest

One day my Local Disk hard drive read the free space as 12gb. A few days
later it decreased to about 8gb. Today i added a few more files, but instead
of decreasing as it usually would, it now said i had 9gb. This constantly
fluctuating hard drive space has been happening a lot to my OS drive, but
never to my storage drive. Other times it read about 6gb, then later about
11gb, and i didn't even delete anything. Is this a sign that my hard drive is
failing? Or has this something to do with Vista?
 
This could be due to c:\pagefile.sys or c:\hiberfil.sys that can take up
several GB depending on your size of RAM and other parameters.
Crash Dumps can take various amount of space too.

I think it is perfectly normal, but you could run a disk check and a disk
clean for performance reasons.
 
k1190 said:
One day my Local Disk hard drive read the free space as 12gb. A few days
later it decreased to about 8gb. Today i added a few more files, but instead
of decreasing as it usually would, it now said i had 9gb. This constantly
fluctuating hard drive space has been happening a lot to my OS drive, but
never to my storage drive. Other times it read about 6gb, then later about
11gb, and i didn't even delete anything. Is this a sign that my hard drive is
failing? Or has this something to do with Vista?
Click to expand...

More than likely, it's System Restore creating restore points.
Every time you get a Windows Update, even if it's just an update
for Windows Defender (those restore points can be stopped) a
restore point is created. Most of the time, when you install or
even uninstall a program, a restore point is created. When the
restore points get to a certain size, some of them are deleted.
If this is a new installation or new computer and you are setting
it up, installing software, you are going to see those type of free
space fluctuations. You can use Disk Cleanup to manually delete all
but the last restore point.


-Michael
 
Thanks for your help. Can you show me how to stop the windows updates from
creating restore point. Thanks
 
Back
Top