Emergency - My Hard Drive is filling up @ 30GB/Hr.

I really need help here. It is getting downright scary. I built this whole computer, and everything was fine. I had Win vista Ultimate 64 with the 32 bit emulator. Then I installed the upgrade to Win-7 over Vista, with no issues, and I was delighted with it, as I was with Vista. All this time, which was about three months, Win Media center was installed, dormant, and I had never used it. Then I hit the holy grail for a home entertainment p.c. I bought the Hauppauge 2250 internal H.D. video recorder card, got it working, and everything was STILL fine, and better than ever. I'm watching Blu-Ray and T.V. on a projector/7 foot screen, and I was in heaven. I have it configured so that all the H.D. recordings go on to the external drive, and it performed flawlessly. Then, about two nights ago, I wrote out an Email, went to save it, and Windows told me I was out of hard drive space on drive C. I tried various upkeep things, and couldn't save it. I thought it was a fluke, so I rebooted, and thought nothing of it. It of course happened again the next day, and I finally checked the C drive space, and it was right - I was out!

I've tried, and noted the following: Antivirus, and anti malware, three diferent reg cleaners, dumping the old system restores, shut off the Windows indexing, and it still does it, but HERE'S the kicker: When I shut the computer off, and turn it back on, all of the space that it sucks up is back to normal. IOW, the average amount used lately is about 33 GB out of 256, it "fills up" I start it over, it gets rid of the newer sucked up space, and it returns to 33 GB. It's using about 30 GB per hour. I tried safe mode, and it did away with almost all of it. it was using about 4.8 MB an hour in safe mode. I timed it over 10 minutes X 6. Sleep mode: That's the way I kept it, and now it hardly will go in to sleep mode. When I try, I hear all the fans speed up, the screen goes off, and from there the only way to get it to go on, is to hold the button in until it goes off, and then it boots up.

I'm at a loss. Thanks so much for a cure.

C drive = (the one that fills up) Patriot Solid State M-28 256 GB
E drive, (which I store all the T.V. and recordings on to) WD external 1 TB green drive

Can you download windirstat? It will look for a giant file and will display a big box for it. Then you can probaly delete what ever it is causing the problem

Any chance your new program is writing large temp files from processing/playing the media? That would explain why rebooting fixes the disk space problem...

Oh Guys, thanks a lot. What a GREAT program. I felt like my foot was glued to the accelerator. No, it wasn't the H.D. program, because that's set up to record to the external green drive. It was pc tools/registry mechanic/hd monitor must have gone berserk. It's probably made for disc drives. LOL Winderstat showed two groups of about 80 gig each. So I ran Revo uninstaller, something which has never failed me, and it showed that it removed it, but it was still cooking, and so I removed it from the tree program. It asked, "Do you know what you are doing?" and the program was too big for the bin, so I took a deep breath and clicked it.

I mentioned that the drive, after turning the comp off and on, would go back down to 33 gig. This time, it went down to 24 gig, so for a long time, there must have been 8 gig of mechanic junk in there also. Now the computer has all of it's punch & snap back.

Right when I saw your reply, there was the same advice from the Patriot forum.

Why is it that the FREE programs work better than the ones that we pay all this money for? LOL
Thanks again!
Dave

nate42nd said:

Welcome to the forum DaveSkynet. I'm over here too.

WinDirStat - Free software downloads and software reviews - CNET Download.com

Hay Nate. Yeah! This sucker is flying now. What HD benchmark program do you use? I'll try that out also. I think I try too many utilities or something. Then I try something like Mechanic, which has always been great, and it blows the whole thing up. I re-installed it with a trial version of a malware program, and I thought it was the other program. I have to learn to leave well enough alone.

I'll post somewhere else about how AWESOME the new HD card is.