Why ? ...and What's going on ??

[ssfwb]

HP Pavilion Slimline s5000 series, Windows 7 home premium, 500g hd.

A couple weeks ago I started deleting unnecessary photos, file folders and internet 'save page as' links.

I started out with 411 gig of free space on a 584 gig hard drive. Got rid of quite a bit of 'stuff'' and clear the recycle bin after each batch.

Now it's showing 407 gig of free space ! What the heck is going on ??? Free space should be increasing, not the reverse.

Any & all help gratefully appreciated.

 

[dave99]

I would start by using your favorite Search application, to find all files on the windows volume, which is usually C:\ and sort those by creation date and modified date to see what's been added, especially the file names of what you had deleted. I hate Win7 search so my favorite search app is Everything (that's the name of it).

I'd also check to see if you have Windows set (which it is by default) to make Backup and Restore points and delete those or disable that feature entirely which also deletes them. Look in Control Panel -> System -> System Protection Tab, highlight the drive volume and click the "Configure" button if that volume shows "Protection", "On", then Turn off system protection if you want it to stop doing that.

I make partition backups instead, that I can pull individual files out of as needed, so that Windows feature is useless to me, as it just bloats the size of the backups.