This might be an ignorant question, so please bear with me. I don't know much about the inner workings of computers, but it seems that my Acer laptop's hardrive is far fuller than it should be. Of 51.6 GB, I only have 1.25 GB free, and it's running rather slowly. I have no movies saved, no pictures or photos, about 100 MP3s, and roughly 1.6 MB of rtf files. I don't have many applications on it, and I recently went through and cleaned out programs I no longer use.

I brought my computer to the campus help desk earlier, only to puzzle them. The tech swore up and down that I shouldn't be using anything like that much space, and that the OS itself should only be using 15 GB or so. The only thing I can think of is that the hidden ProgramData > Microsoft folder is taking up 37 GB. I have no idea if that's a normal number or what. When I went into that folder to check things out, it seemed that the various components didn't add up to anything like 37 GB.

If anyone is willing to enlighten a n00b, I'd love to hear your ideas as to why I'm getting such wonky numbers and how I could free up some space on my laptop. By some ruthless pruning of old files, I got it to the point where I'm no longer getting 'low memory' error messages, but I'd prefer to not have to do that in the near future. If you need more information, I'll do my best to answer your questions.

Thank you!

You are correct, you should not be using that much memory!

I have over 600 photos, and well over 5,000 songs with various word type documents, and I still have 67% of my 80 gig HD open!

You are not by any chance running backups on your hard drive are you?

That would be the only way I can see that your memory would be so limited.

Good luck with this one!

Huh. I suspected as much! I'm not running backups at all. If I can't figure this out myself, it seems that I'll have to have one of the computer shops in town check this out for me. :(

Thank you for the well-wishes, progunr.

Hello Spritely,

You might not be running backups but I'll betcha your System Restore is filling up your hard drive with outdated restore points so you might want to try the Vista (built-in) disk cleanup utility here (with step by step instructions): http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/Help/1264bc24-72a8-48aa-84e3-a355327139d91033.mspx