Why is my computer losing memory on the hard drive?

I have an hp entertainment laptop with 250GB hard drive and 2GB DDR2 memory.

it came with norton security for 60 days

and it is windows vista.

why is the memory going down so fast know it is at 170GB and i only had it for a month and i don't have much in it maybe like 200 songs, but thats just like 1GB of memory, why does it go down so fast and can i fix it.

Why is my computer losing memory on the hard drive?pop up blocker

What has probably happened is that Windows is making a shadow copy of your hard drive. In other words, it is making a duplicate image of your hard drive in case of system failure and loss of data. Consequently, this eats up your available hard disk drive space twice as fast.

When I am wondering what big files are consuming most of my space, I just perform a simple search. From Windows XP, you would click START %26gt; SEARCH %26gt; ALL FILES AND FOLDERS %26gt; WHAT SIZE IS IT %26gt; SPECIFY SIZE (IN KB). Then make sure that it says "at least" and to the right of that, type in a big number, like 10000. Click SEARCH.

The procedure for searching in Vista is a bit different. You will have to do an 'advanced search' from within the Vista Search window. I don't have Vista running at this moment and therefore cannot tell you exactly how to accomplish this task.

Anyways, this will start a search of your local hard drives and will bring a result list of all files on your computer that are over 10000 KB (10 megs). Once it is done searching, click the word SIZE in the column heading in the result search list to sort the documents by size.