Disappearing C drive space

I have Windows 7 Home Edition. I realize there are newer versions but I'm one that does not like to take the computer this working with lots of software loaded and change.

But I have a problem. It is a Dell laptop and they only allocated 58 GB to the C drive and and 440 GB to the D drive. Once installing standard programs like Mail and Windows and Excel and various other things the space started disappearing quickly. I moved the mail directory to the D drive and now I've got a failure and have to restore that because I've only got 32 megabytes of free space on the C drive. I had already moved the paging file to the D drive. It seems that no matter what I do to try to get space on the C drive including deleting programs I really don't use it's instantly taken up by some process. I don't know where to look.

I realize that a simple solution would be to backup the Entire Computer but it only backs up data and not programs. That's why I can't use carbonite. I don't want to have to reinstall all my programs just to properly configure the C drive with at least a 100 GB.

As it stands, the computer drags. I've got to paging file set to be managed on the D drive by the system. It's using what it says it needs. But it seems as if there's some kind of caching taking place on the C drive and I don't know from where.

Any suggestions? I really don't want to go to Windows 10 or 11. I didn't even want to switch from XP. Obviously it EOL and not safe to run. I realize it Windows 7 will be EOL in 2020. I'll have to bust a move then. But for now I just like some drive space so that I have some flexibility to move around. I don't want to have to get in there and look around was it partitioning software that's supposed to save your data while repartitioning when I know it's going to fail because there's no room on the C drive to store the data backup.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you both for your replies. I greatly appreciate it. There seems to be a couple of misunderstandings that I think I should clear up.

First, I'm not storing any backup on the physical drives. I have a 1tb USB backup unit from Western Digital. That's not the issue. The issue is that when Dell partitioned the HDD they only made it 58 GB which is too small once you install applications and then you have caching as well as the pagesys file. As I mentioned I have removed programs and I've even moved data from mail for example from the C drive to the D drive to clear up space on the C partition. It's nearly 2GB of space that was instantly gobbled up by something. That's my question. What is instantly gobbling up to space I free? I've already got two pages file on the D partition and various other applications store their data on the D drive which is my preference and has been for 40 years. I have had no backup meltdowns before and I know how important backups are. The only issue with backups is that I cannot backup the applications using something like Carbonite. It will only let me backup the data. I might as well just do a data backup directly from Windows and reinstall the OS if that's the case.

I've been doing this for 40 years and I really don't feel like reinstalling the OS even though I know the benefits of it. Suddenly everything runs fast again and the cookies and crap that get in there and tell advertisers what underwear you look at all that and things run smoothly for a while. But it's a lot of work and I'm disabled now. I can't sit up for any length of time.

The point is is the changing the size of the HDD is not the issue. The issue is changing the size of the partition. I have plenty of space on the D partition. I got close to 350 GB on it. But there's so little space measured in megabytes on the C partition but if I attempt to use partition magic or something to resize it I'm destined to have a failure. I can honestly say I own every piece of software that requires a purchase but I can also say I don't necessarily remember where I stored the key. I usually have a key file on a floppy or a CD. Come to think of it, I haven't used a floppy in Forever. But my laptop has a floppy Drive.

I am not familiar with macrium reflect and will look into it. As I mentioned I can't even use Carbonite because their issue is with copyrighted software. It seems to me if one has a licensed copy of Microsoft Office with a valid serial number and a way of checking it with Microsoft there should be no issue backing up the software along with the data. Carbonite is not a small company with 11 million customers and I'm sure they could work something out with Microsoft is just one example. I mean verifying a license and then backing up the application. There's already people out there that is found ways to break the mousetrap and steal the software but I'm not one of them.

This might paint me in a lesser light but that's okay. I humble myself. I am not a Windows man. I actually own a web hosting company and run Linux. I'm more than familiar with partitioning drives and setting up raid and whatnot. My desktop in fact runs RAID 0 and my units at the data center run RAID 5. My issue is that I am disabled and lay in bed most of the day using my laptop to do my part of running the business aside of my technicians who keep the servers running. I can get around in Windows but ever since the early 2000s I just haven't kept up. I had a Linux business to run and it has occupied all of my time.

I don't know why Dell would do something so asinine. What you need to do is bring your pagefile back to C drive and anything else program wise installed to D to C if you can. Once that's all done you should be able to go into Disk Management and delete the D drive partition and then extend the C drive.

To get to disk management. Right click the My computer icon and chose Manage. Go to Storage | Disk Management. Then you can right click the drives and conduct operations.

Just remember that anything on D will be deleted once you delete the D drive partition and then extend C drive. So that's why you want to remove anything on D and revert the pagefile back to C.

My apology for such a long reply just above yours. My laptop at the moment is sitting waiting for me to try to restore email on it. Right now I'm on my cell phone and I can't tell exactly how long my message was. It appears I wrote a book. A novel. Larger than Warren peace. Your paragraph I'll have to give some consideration of that because I do have files on the D partition like my download directory. That kind of stuff I can back up and not worry about it because I can just restore it. I do have some directories however where I have directed programs to store their data on the D partition. So I have to put a little thought end of that.

I agree that it was asinine for whoever set this HDD up do you only create a bootable partition of roughly 10%. Honestly, I should have fixed it when I first got the laptop but I didn't now I got to pay the price for it.

With no caching space it took a little bit longer but I was able to move the Windows Live database to the D partition. That cleared up 35 GB of space on the C partition.

Thank you Steve for taking the time to reply but it looks as if he failed to notice that I've already got a Western Digital external backup Drive. I read your footer but I guess you didn't read the fact that I own a web hosting company with just over 100 Linux servers online did backup daily. The issue at hand is not spending money to buy another backup USB drive, but figuring out what it is that's trying to gobble up all the space on my C drive even after I move data directories from certain applications to the D drive. What's eating my C drive?