Alice

Hello, Thanks for your help - and sorry for my delay in replying! :) Well, something strange is definitely going on - I switched my computer on today after not using it for a day and my free space is now at 486gb free without me even doing anything! (I'm fully up to date with virus stuff and am apparently virus-free, just to add) I will definitely try what you suggested but that will wait until the morning, I don't trust myself not to mess it up in my current tired condition I was going to partition this drive when I bought it, then my ex (who liked to think of himself as very computer savvy) said it wouldn't make any difference but I seem to have eaten the space very quickly...I'm sure it is vista deciding to use all the space it possibly can. In future, if I had time to partition it and do a clean install, or if I upgraded to windows 7 would it be worthwhile to partition it so that the windows partition only had x-amount of memory or is it more hassle than it's worth? Thanks again for your help, Alice :)

Hello, I'm new here, thanks in advance for any help! :) I did search to see if I could find a relevant answer for my question, but I didn't really know what to search for so didn't have much success in finding anything - sorry if this has been asked before! I'm using a 1TB hard disk, it's quite new - about five months old - a western digital one. I've been doing lots and lots of rearranging/deleting files in the past few days, so I thought it'd be a good idea to do a defrag. Before defragging I ran COMODO system cleaner to do a registry clean up, a disk clean up and an applications clean up (internet files etc). These all ran successfully and did free up some space. After this I ran Auslogics disk defragmenter. Before defragmenting my hard drive had exactly 500gb free space...Now it has 426gb of free space - where did my 74gb go? Any suggestions on how to get them back?? The defragmentation report says it went from 42.79% fragmentation before to 23.55% fragmentation afterwards, so it did defragment, but surely if it's just rearraging things it shouldn't be using masses of space? Or is this just the way with big hard drives? (My last was 250gb, so 1tb seems huge to me!). Thanks again, Alice :)