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  1. I have a computer with more partitions on one hard-drive. I mean, Windows 7 and Vista, dual-boot on it.

    Maybe that contributes to my problem, or maybe not.

    However, the issue remains that I free up space whenever I get close to 0 GB, and Windows 7 (64-bit, Professional) keeps misusing the space that I free up such that it disappears.

    What the hell is wrong with Windows 7?

    Just a few days ago, I physically deleted several files for good, and I had over 2.5 GB free.

    Today, after doing some editing, I ran CCleaner and Internet Eraser, and I expected to see back that >2.5GB free on the Windows 7 partition.
    But I only have 1.72 GB free now. WTF? Where the hell did those damn 800 Megs go?

    Anybody have any idea?
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  2. System Restore?
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  3. Member ranchhand's Avatar
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    There's nothing wrong with Windows 7. If you are running with only 2.5 gigs of space left on your HD, especially doing CPU and memory intensive video editing work, Windows can eat that in one session. You should always have minimally 20% of your total HD capacity free. At this point I suspect that your system has slowed since W7 writes to the virtual drive so your computer won't crash. The days of DOS and full drives is gone forever. Windows requires a lot of free space to run properly. Time for a new, larger drive or possibly get rid of Vista to make room. 1TB and larger drives are becoming the standard now.
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  4. Don't you think, if I could free up more, I would?


    But my question is, if Windows 7 is using the space on my hard-drive in one session, why the fuqkh isn't it freeing it up after a cleaning, and a reboot, for use again during the next session?
    You know? Like XP and other older OSs do?


    P.S. The days of almost-fully-used hard-drives will never be over!

    P.P.S. If not editing, Windows 7 runs exactly the same with 2 GB or 100 GB free on the system partition.
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  5. You can use SpaceSniffer: http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/ to check if Windows unnecessarily ate up more space on your drive. Sometimes you can be really surprised.
    The program is portable and easy to use. Just run it as administrator. Every time you click some area it will take you deeper showing more details.
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    First off you did not say how large your hard drive is or how much ram you have installed,,you should consider putting in a 2nd hard drive especially if you are dual booting to 2 operating systems..Mechanical hard drives are cheap to buy and easy to install..There is no way I would keep that little space left on any of my hard drives for the mere fact that you cant even defrag it properly..That being said there are things you can change in Win 7 to get back space..Windows 7 defaults the paging file size to the total amount of ram you have installed.If you have 16gigs of ram it will keep 16gigs of hard drive space available for it..Also System Protection/system restore only needs to be set for no more then 3% of the total hard drive space (in my opinion).. Or turn off system restore altogether I havent had the need for it in over a decade..YES Windows 7 does use and store alot of info but thats the way things are today..95/98/XP are a done deal now and There is nuthing wrong with your windows 7 get used to it..You can find the things Im talking about under Control Panel/System/advanced system settings/advanced tab/performance settings/advanced/performance options/advanced/virtual memory change..System protection tab is there also,,lower the slider in there to like 3% like I mentioned earlier,,and Ccleaner will clean out your restore points in a clic..And lastly you should go to Windows 7 forums or just bing or google this stuff you would be amazed at what you can find out just by reading...Good Luck..
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  7. If your system is running fine otherwise, delete all System Restore backups except the latest. That will probably free up several GB.
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  8. Originally Posted by newsgroup guy View Post
    I have a computer with more partitions on one hard-drive. I mean, Windows 7 and Vista, dual-boot on it.

    Maybe that contributes to my problem, or maybe not.

    However, the issue remains that I free up space whenever I get close to 0 GB, and Windows 7 (64-bit, Professional) keeps misusing the space that I free up such that it disappears.

    What the hell is wrong with Windows 7?

    Just a few days ago, I physically deleted several files for good, and I had over 2.5 GB free.

    Today, after doing some editing, I ran CCleaner and Internet Eraser, and I expected to see back that >2.5GB free on the Windows 7 partition.
    But I only have 1.72 GB free now. WTF? Where the hell did those damn 800 Megs go?

    Anybody have any idea?
    Hom much RAM do you have installed in your pc? I'm asking because I had similar problem like yours. Few weeks ago I increased installed memory from 4 GB to 64 GB and immediately I noticed that OS was eating hdd space like crazy (~128 GB). In my case I had to do two adjustments.

    1) Disable automatic Page File size and manually force 1 GB size (for compatibility reason with some games and apps I didn't disable it completely ) . Because I have 64 GB ram installed Windows also automatically created 64 GB page file on hdd!



    2) Disable completely Hibernation. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920730

    The Hiberfil.sys hidden system file is located in the root folder of the drive where the operating system is installed. The Windows Kernel Power Manager reserves this file when you install Windows. The size of this file is approximately equal to how much random access memory (RAM) is installed on the computer.
    I also removed Service Pack Backup Files
    Last edited by Atak_Snajpera; 16th Mar 2014 at 09:09.
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  9. Gonna try all of your suggestions, right now.

    But, also, here's what just happened. For some strange reason, as I was trying to copy the contents of a DVD (- to double-check that the DVD was burned fine -) to the hard-drive, the computer got the blue screen and rebooted.
    After it restarted, I noticed 9.27 GB free. Yes. That seems more like the correct amount of free space I should have (!!!), because I did free up about that over the course of the last 10 months or so.
    But then I shut down the computer, powered it back up, and my stupid Windows 7 only sees 1.84 GB free now on the Windows 7 partition.

    This is crap, really!

    Do you think there could be a fix for this on the Windows 7 Update web page?

    I hope it's the paging file, like people said. (We shall see soon.)


    There are 8 GB of RAM.

    Hard-drive is 500 GB, Wd. Partition of Windows 7 is 120 GB.


    Thanks to everybody.
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  10. I'm posting an explanation now, just in case other people may need to follow the same steps:

    So, in my case, indeed the paging file was eating up a lot of space. I limited it to 1024 MB, like suggested, and about 6 GB re-surfaced, yes. Thank you very much!

    The hiberfil.sys file had been disabled previously, though, so I didn't need to do that.

    System Restore also was disabled. (I would never even dare to use that anyway, so I always disable it, because what if I use it and it deletes something really useful...)

    Disk Cleanup does not find any Service Pack Backup Files for me. It does find "system error memory dump files", but those are about 689 kB, so why bother?


    Finally, I've tried SpaceSniffer, and I think it is really really cool! I would recommend it to everyone, even if they use it just for fun/info.

    It does a great job at drawing one's attention to where the most space is used, on any hard-drive.


    Thanks again, everybody!


    P.S. Over 1-2 GB still keep disappearing every Win7 session, but thus far I've run CCleaner both times and it got most of it back. (However, I don't think I'm back to the max I had right after deleting/disabling all the stuff. Why, damn Windows 7?!?...)
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  11. Check this folder C:\Users\(User-Name)\AppData\Local\Temp
    if you have files in this folder you can delete all files manually
    some times cleanup programs don't delete all files from this folder
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  12. That's probably a very good suggestion. Thank you very much!

    For me, at the moment, however, it did not make a difference, because I found only about 2-3 MB in there, but I'll try remembering to check it often.

    Cheers.
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  13. Also make sure that Hiberfil.sys was removed (it should be hidden on C:\ ). I wouldn't be surprised if that file was still there even if you disabled hibernation in options
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  14. Member Frank-0-Video's Avatar
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    Greetings ...

    Check your running processes for a program called DLLHost.exe. It's a legit file and is needed, but certain things could cause it to unintentionally chew up RAM.

    Thanx-A-Lot, Frank-0-Video
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  15. Member
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    That's not much room (120gb) for a Win7 partition. First of all, I can't imagine why you'd want both a Vista and a Win7 partition. There's nothing that can run in Vista that can't run on Win7. You should have just upgraded Vista to Win7 straight up.

    I'd backup the files you need in Vista, drop the Vista partition and make everything Win7. Whether that's trough a full wipe and a reinstall of Win7 or just dropping the Vista partition and re-allocating it to Win7 is up to you.

    And, this assumes you don't have the US$75 for a new (1TB or more) hard drive.
    Have a good one,

    neomaine

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  16. All good suggestions, but here's the deal:

    Originally Posted by ranchhand View Post
    You should always have minimally 20% of your total HD capacity free...Time for a new, larger drive or possibly get rid of Vista to make room.
    Why so stubborn about getting another hard drive?
    Pull! Bang! Darn!
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  17. Banned
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    newsgroup guy last logged in on April 1, so we may all be wasting our time by continuing to "help" him.

    I really don't know what to say to someone who thought that 120 GB was sufficient for a Win 7 boot drive. My personal advice would be that 256 GB is probably as small as you should go, but we've had reports here of people who've used even smaller drives for it, like 60 GB or so. His posts remind me of the old joke about self-inflicted injuries where a guy says to a doctor "Doc it hurts every time I do this. What should I do?" and the doctor says "Stop doing that!" You want 120 GB for Win 7, then running out of space is what you can expect to happen.
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  18. I run Win7 on 120 GB boot drives. I use mostly portable applications that can run off network shares. Most in-progress jobs and backup images are on a local hard drive, archives on a NAS. Browser cache is on a 4GB RAM disk. And one computer really only runs Windows Media Center and records on a second (hard) drive. After a while free space drops by 10 to 20 GB because of all the restore points created by System Restore. So I clear most of them every few months. That's what I was referring to in my first post of this thread.
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