~10GB suddenly taking up room on SSD.

[Terbinator]

I thought things were running slow until i went into Computer and seen i had <2GB of free space left

I've deleted various programs, documents and so on and ~10GB of used space is still eluding me. CCleaner, disk cleanup and christ knows what else can't see to recover this 10GB, and more worryingly, detect what it is exactly.

Basically, everything that i can count up including all program folders, User, and the Windows folder comes in at around 25GB out of 35GB available.

Any ideas? I really don't want to nuke

[spoon_]

Check and delete:

Pagefile, hibernation file, prefetch, temp [in Windows], temp in your local profile dir, the whole new wonderful Microsoft Error Reporting junk.

Failing that use TreeSize Pro to check what's or which dir is eating up your space.

[Terbinator]

All that was either switched off or located on another drive, thanks for the suggestion though.

One nuke later and all is good in the world

Although I'm still puzzled as to what it was...

[LuckyNV]

Win7 "wastes" quite a bit of space.

Find in your Windows folder for this folder "winsxs", then google and read the top few articles on what's inside that folder.

Useless...?

Its 7GB in my 1 year old Win7 install.

[Terbinator]

This 'change' literally occurred in the space of an hour, if not less - thats the part i don't get.

[mikemikemi]

My winsxs folder if 13Gb, although from what I've read some folders are hard links, so the size shown is not necessarily its actual size.

[watercooled]

At least nuking probably doesn't take all that long on an SSD. For future reference I'd use something like TreeSize as Spoon said, I prefer Windirstat(portable) myself as it's easier to identify space hogs IMO, plus it's open source which I like.
Oh and system restore is another one that loves to eat your drive capacity, left at defaults.

[LuckyNV]

My winsxs folder if 13Gb, although from what I've read some folders are hard links, so the size shown is not necessarily its actual size.

The thing is those files exist somewhere on your drive.

I deleted what I could find of anything Nvidia because I switched to AMD. Yet in that WinSXS folder had references to 3 large Nvidia related files which were apparently drivers of some sort.

I managed to manually delete them and saved about 400MB. Win7 didn't complain.
I still have a few large files and many many 80-90MB files and a truck load of 1-4MB files.

Point being I'm certain we don't need all those files, but how does one go about removing them (you need to jump through hoops just to delete 1 file). The file names are quite cryptic too.

[watercooled]

I found this quite an interesting article, it applies to XP systems so not a huge amount of use here although there may well be Win 6/7 version somewhere.

[Agent]

Spacemonger has always served me well
Make sure you run it as an admin, so it can read / write all the files on your disk. Only takes seconds on a SSD