My hard drive randomly fills up for no reason

[DemizeGamer]

My hard drive randomly fills up for no reason

This morning I had 9GB free (it was filling up slowly). Earlier today I was watching youtube, a message popped up and said I was running very low on disk space. I looked and I had 30.0MB left of space!. I was not downloading anything. what the heck.

 

[theunliked]

Try download this tool:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/windirstat/

It tells you whats using up your hard drive space. It should help you find the culprit. Have you done a virus scan? Also, download CCleaner.

 

[rhysiam]

There's lots of things that can take up space in the background. Youtube does have to cache things locally, so that can affect it. Windows 10 has a pretty large system update at the moment which could be happening in the background. It could also be malware related.

You need to find where your space is going. I like Treesize Free, it scans your drive and shows you exactly what folders are taking up the most space.
https://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/
Drill down into them until you find the where all your free space is going. If you've identified the culprit (often Internet cache, log files, etc), then start Googling to find out how to clear it up safely.

How big is your drive and how much stuff have you got on it? Is it perhaps time to invest in a bigger drive?

 

[theunliked]

There's lots of things that can take up space in the background. Youtube does have to cache things locally, so that can affect it. Windows 10 has a pretty large system update at the moment which could be happening in the background. It could also be malware related.

You need to find where your space is going. I like Treesize Free, it scans your drive and shows you exactly what folders are taking up the most space.
https://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/
Drill down into them until you find the where all your free space is going. If you've identified the culprit (often Internet cache, log files, etc), then start Googling to find out how to clear it up safely.

How big is your drive and how much stuff have you got on it? Is it perhaps time to invest in a bigger drive?

Even youtube shouldn't fill up 9GBs in several hours. I forget to say. If you don' have enough disk space to download the software, try running disk cleanup as administrator.

 

[rhysiam]

Even youtube shouldn't fill up 9GBs in several hours. I forget to say. If you don' have enough disk space to download the software, try running disk cleanup as administrator.

I agree youtube won't do that on its own, and it's certainly possible that it's a malware issue - I was simply trying to make the point that it's also possible that it's not a malware issue. Background tasks do legitimately chew up large chunks of space without notification from time to time. I lived with one of the early 60GB SSDs for a few years and was regularly clearing up space only to find some other task/program had gobbled it up again.

In any case, we both agree that OP needs to look at the drive usage in detail to try and find where all that space is going.

 

[DemizeGamer]

Also my PC is blue screening a lot.

I have a 160GB HDD, and a separate 120GB HDD.

I don't have that many programs, and I had about 20-25GB when I noticed my space to decrease little by little. I blame the crappy dell computer. I need a new computer for gmod videos (here they are: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLizOVKBXPSlHVEO05ZI6Me9rsE7mgKZ9o) that i want to build.

EDIT: i have 90 processes open. what the heck

EDIT2: Ok, i am done with this, this pc is so slow. I am going to do a format of everything and reinstall windows 7 (don't worry, i have saved stuff on a flash drive)