Vista? eating up my hard drive alive

[Glitchking]

I have a lenovo t61 laptop here, 100gb hard drive but some of it was partitioned into a "service" partition so theres 86.6gb of personal hard drive space. When I highlight and right click -> properties all the stuff in my hard drive it says only 32 gb of space is used up. Yet when I click start -> computer my hard drive reports only 13.6gb free space remaining. I already lowered the max amount of space that restore points can take up from 12 to 5gb, increasing my free space from 2.5gb to its current 13.6 gb. I also did a disk cleanup and made sure all my restore points but the latest one got deleted. My program files folder only has 3 gb of stuff in it, Windows folder with 10gb, and Users folder with 17.4gb.
Where did all my hard disk space go?

[Cmptr-Gy-Dv]

is vista doing any image backups?

[Steve R Jones]

The recycle bin reserves a good ten percent of the drive(which can be adjusted)....Swap file can be 2 or more gigs...

[Glitchking]

How would I check if Vista is doing image backups?

Recycling bin is empty.

Swap file? That a page file?

[Cmptr-Gy-Dv]

look in start/programs/maintenance/backup

[Glitchking]

I don't see any images that I can tell in the Backup and Restore Center.

[Steve R Jones]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Glitchking

Recycling bin is empty.

Swap file? That a page file?

Windows "reserves" disk space as system space for the recycle bin regardless if it has files in it or not.

Swap file - page file - virtual memory are the same thing.

[PC-HELL]

I had this problem, after spending several hours on this i found out why so much space was being used, Just about everytime you install software or the computer updates Vista Creates a restore point, I myself had lost over 30Gb just out of the blue, if this is your issue, then first you need to create a restore point to an external driver or a dvd, perferrably a externall drive
needs to be atleast 10Gb or more, then once you do that, remove the external drive from your system and do a disk clean up and make sure you check from all users, select all you want cleaned up, but dont hit ok yet, click on more options then locate delete but the most recent restore point if you are interested in freeing space, click delete only if you feel that you are not going to need to restore to a very early time, once done then click ok disk cleanup will finish the rest of the cleanup, you should then see a big difference in space aquired.
hope this answers your question

Additional-
have you checked your ADD/Remove programs to see if anything in there you didnt install, might want to do a scan for any worms/viruses that are multiplying. last but not least run a diagnostics on your computer see if you fail the harddrive test, could possible be your harddrive is slowly killing itself, just remember for when you decrease the liguid in the glass the space and volume has increased, yet something must fill the empty space.
give this some thought