What the hell is going on with storage space on c?

I've got Vista Business x86 at my office. My C partition is ~45GB and D ~100GB. I've moved all the relevant user folders to D ("Documents", "Downloads", "Music"...), so I use primary partition only for installations.



Yesterday I got another warning about low disc space on C. I have already disabled creation of shadow copies and restore points. I had 410MB left on C with empty recycle bin. I decided to uninstall some programs, so I got rid of the largest program after MS Office (350MB). After uninstalling it and checking that recycle bin is empty, I checked the disk space on C - it was 391MB now!!!



Then I started disc cleanup application, checked everything, and after cleaning I suddenly got 9.4GB free!

Yesterday I worked in Excel, Putty, jEdit, Firefox and Chrome. I didn't install anything. This morning I had 6.7GB free!



Where the hell almost 3.5GB of my space gone??



I tried disk cleanup, cleaning shadow copies, emptying recycle bin, but nothing happened...

 

To try to recover more space, you could turn off hibernation and remove the hiberfil.sys file. That will remove some space.



As to the sudden space usage, the only thing that comes to mind are temporary internet files, ms office backup files, and shadow copies. I presume you checked disk cleanup and removed everything you don't need. Would check it again to see what was added overnight. You could also open up event viewer and look at the size of your logs.



Even then, it's hard to see how all that could add up to several GB of filespace!