Hard Drive Problems (Fills up one day and another shows space)

[cableman]

I installed an 80GB Solid State hard drive as my startup drive with only windows 7 and my basic software; browser, antivirus, etc. Software I felt important to keep as a group on startup. Obviously I did this for a quick boot and put in a second drive for all my files and other programs. I will make a shortcut for the desktop to a file I use frequently in order to keep my solid state drive clean. The problem is that my solid state drive seems to be filling up and I can't understand it since windows 7 and a few software programs along with microsoft updates cannot be filling this drive up from 40GB used space to almost full at 80GB. I have cleaned out virus in the past and used various software recommended by one of the techs on this site and sometimes when we clean it, I end up with 20GB available free space which is correct but now I keep getting filled up to the point of only 5GB or less and I can't find anything using that much space. When we have cleaned for virus before is has indirectly corrected this problem most times but I am virus free now as far as I know. I have run several tests. I am going to clone this drive to a larger one but if there is a problem I don't want to transfer it. Please help me if you have an idea what is happening.

 

[DelJo63]

Empty all browser caches, reset max size to 100mb each

run CLEANMGR under every login on the system
then under the ADMIN user, run again and [x] Clean up System Files.

 

[cableman]

Thank you for the advice but I did these things and to no avail. There is hard drive space being used somehow in files that are either redundant, unnecesary, temp., or otherwise needless data taking up space. I have a solid state hard drive so I have not attempted to defragment it since I have been warned against doing so to solid state drives. I really need help in this matter. I am about to upgrade the size of my drive but I am hesitant to do so until I make sure there are no problems that could pass onto the new drive since I will be using a copy of my current operating system. Thank you for your time. I was only able to clean up almost 2GB, nowhere near what I know can be cleaned.

 

[DelJo63]

You are correct; DO NOT DEFRAG an SSD device.

With browser caches limited, the question is What is running creating files?
I assume you hav Windows Update set to AUTO - - reset it to NEVER; rerun the Cleanmgr commands above and reboot.
Now try to monitor disk usage for a while

 

[cableman]

No I assume that I don't. I never let any software programs auto update with the exception of my anti-virus and even that is on a ask me what to do when updates are available mode. I never ever allow software to add, update, or any further actions it may be programmed to do on it's own to screw up my computer. And I didn't assume, I double checked that nothing had changed.