hard drive appears nearly full but is only 25% used

I have vista home premium, 200gb hard drive. i had not been payin
attention until I received a warning that I was running out of space
Being sort of a dummy, I took computer to Best Buy. They ra
diagnostics. They found no problems. Then they cleaned it up an
optimized it. When I got it home the C drive showed 177gb capacity wit
135gb free space. Within 3 days my free space was reduced by appro
25gb. I downloaded and ran Auslogics Defrag and my free space was agai
135gb. But in the last 5 days my free space has been disappearing. It'
at 113gb right now. I realize that's plenty of free space, but I'd lik
to rectify this problem before I'm close to showing full again. Ca
someone help me

 

Hi, Frank.

This question gets asked often, so Google or Bing should find plenty of
answers for you. But the answers come in many parts because there are many
causes for your question - so there are many partial answers.

Just a few candidates:
Since files are stored on the disk in fixed-size "clusters" or "allocation
units", a one-byte file can take a full 4 KB cluster, so many small files
can take a lot more space than just the number of bytes in the files.

Deleted files continue to take up space until you empty the Recycle Bin.

System Restore points can gobble up loads of space, depending on your
settings in Control Panel | System | System Protection.

The hidden system files hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys can take up several
times as much space as your total RAM.

As I said, these are just a few possible places to start your research.
There are many others. Good luck!

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX

Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8089.0726) in Win7 Ultimate x64)