Why does the space used by files on my hard drive show different numbers depending on how I look?

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yes i have same problem with my hard drive seagate 1tb it start to decrease incrementally every day then it stopped at 599. i think if i did not laugh my head of insanely, every time i saw the gb's go down [lol thought of marry poppins then] my pc would be quite cripple by now. It is now showing 399 used space with 531 free space [i recently added all the star trek next gen episodes {this explains the change from 599 to 531}]
Please help me my email is [personal email address removed].

AHOI!!!! ok so i turned off the 'hide protected operating system files [recommended]' and my used space went up from 170gb to 260 [this is opening c drive, selecting all folders and as you know right click properties] but still i had 399 used space in the actual properties of the c drive in my computer, anyway thanks to the user: Poo i turned off my system restore and WHAM free space 670 and used 260 bada boom! very happy but i have rechecked my system restore...aww common its *in gollums slimy voice* 'too risky.. too risky!!!' well yeah so if i see an incremental drop in free space i know what its about now, so thanks a lot

hello i am having the same problem on my new laptop i intalled some updates and the coputer was telling me that i had used 50g of space how can i fix this i dont want my hard drive filled up thx

I am using a Lenovo T60 laptop and it has 60gb hard disk in it. The avalable harddisk space 55gb. I used to delete the unanted temporary files, temporary internet files, cookies, prefetch, etc to maintain good performance of the PC. And there was 20gb free space which one day gradually decreased to 3gb,1gb,712mb,400mb,100mb and even worse to KB of 156kb and finally to 0bytes of free hard disk space and pops up disk cleanup utility to clean up hard disk. So i am unable to run any programs or work on it properly. Even if i free up unwanted files as well as wanted data and free up space in it, the free space decreases immediately to 66mb or lesser free space which makes the PC slow. I have not installed any unwanted programs other than the usual wanted softwares an i am pretty sure about that. I suspect if this is a virus or spyware issue.

Is there anyway to make System Restore use less space if we would like to have the benefit of a restore, but not use up all our space? I just saved half my hard drive by taking System Restore off.

Thanks for that, by the way.

in my computer the c drive size become less every day about 1 mb decrease in size of my 9.31gb hard disk, so what is the solution?

in explorer go to tools, folder options, view. then, make sure to mark "display system folders". you will see a "recycler" folder directly under C-drive. a lot of deleted items are stored there for some reason. so you have to extra delete your files.

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