Whats going on and what do I do about it?

I decided that my laptop was getting a bit congested and thought it would be a good idea to free up space by moving larger, infrequently used folders off of the PC. I went out and purchased a 32 gig flash drive so I could keep the files close when I am on the road (the guy in the store suggested Corsair and the 10 year warranty sold me), spent a bunch of time copying over some 20 gigs of data, deleted the old files, and was surprised to see no change in the free space available on the C drive. I then ran Wise Disk cleaner and emptied the Recycle Bin, and still no change, rebooted the PC and actually lost .1 of a gig of available space. Decided this was stupid, restored the PC using RX and am now typing this question.

How do I free up space other than by doing a full reformat and reinstall (which I really would not want to have to do by the way)?

I am running XP SP 3 on a Fujitsu Tablet PC. Explorer is showing 40 gigs of space available out of 110 both before and after deleting the 20 gigs of data.

Would wiping the free space make a diff? Is the space really available even if Explorer is not indicating it is? If so how would I find out what the true state of the drive is?

Any ideas/suggestions as to what I can do about this will be much appreciated.

 

You could run Disk Cleanup. I usually run it twice (once a month). The first time is to clean up files (i.e. Temp, etc.). The second run of Disk Cleanup is used to remove all except the most recent Restore Point. Removing all Restore Points except the most recent can free up as much as around 2 GB of disk space.

Start->All Programs->Accessories->System Tools->Disk Cleanup

 

Thanks for the reply, I will give it a try. I would have thought that Wise Disk Cleaner would accomplish the same thing only better. I had Disk Cleanup a few days ago to compress old files but the gain is space was almost nonexistent which is one of the reasons (well, actually a major reason) I am taking the steps I am taking. Of course this was before I removed the folders from the drive so hopefully it makes a difference.

Oh ya, I have restore turned off as its redundant on systems running Rollback.

I also wonder if running check-disk would be a good idea. It seems to me I had issues with the way Windows was reporting available and used space on a PC I had a good number of years ago. I think I had to run check-disk to deal with this but I probably am wrong about that. Can't hurt though,,,, I guess. Any thoughts on this?

 

@bgoodman4, running chkdsk is always a good idea. Also update your rollback rx baseline to your current snapshot, as you are obviously not going to rollback after deleting 20 gig of data. It will free up space from earlier snapshots, as you know rollback does not actually allow physical deletion of data protected in its snapshots. After you do that I am sure you will recover your 20 gig missing free space.

 

That makes sense.

As to me knowing that rollback does not actually allow physical deletion of data protected in its snapshots I must in honesty say that I did not realize that and that had not occurred to but it is fairly obvious now that you point it out.

Thank you Pete & Raza0007 for clearing this mystery up for me.