Need help finding elusive files on my laptop hard drive.

[mikestock]

I have searched every way I know to find out what is eating up the hard drive space on my HP laptop. When I look at the “C” drive under “Computer” it tells me I only have 70 GB available out of 575 GB. This puzzles me because when searching all groups under the “C” drive I can only locate about 150 GB in use. The biggest group is “Users” at 113 GB followed by “Windows” at 26 GB and “Program Files (x86)” at 7 GB. All other categories are less than 1 GB. Everything I can add up leaves, conservatively, 240 GB unaccounted for.

In the initial setup of the computer I suspect that there is a duplicate set of files that I set up when the computer was new and I was dealing with the “Identities”. Never quite understood what I was doing at that point. I am the only user but I do have one identity set up as non-administrator with a different desktop and a Guest identity that it won’t let me delete.

Can anyone tell me how to search further and find out how to account for the other files that are using 200+ GB of space?

[bwanshoom]

x2 on WinDirStat.

Download directly from the source.

[leaddog]

I use a free program called WINDIRSTAT to monitor my hard drive.

Win Dir Stat - Download from CNET.COM

[hawkeye-08]

I run a program called CCleaner (crap cleaner) that deletes temp files, etc.

[2oldman]

The first thing that comes to mind is a whole lot of temp files and junk. Right-click on C:, Properties, Disk cleanup. See what that does.

Another tactic: Look in Windows/temp. You could delete that entire directory and be ok. Check it out on google first if that's not something you want to do. At least in the 'old days' that used to be a huge repository of crap.

As for identities, I don't know.