Phantom "stuff" taking up space on storage drive

I seem to remember seeing a post like this a few years ago but don't remember how it was solved....my wife's laptop (Win7) is set up with a 70GB partition for the OS and another 70GB partition for document and photo storage. System drive is C:\ and storage is D:\. Both drives show as 85% full, give or take, and yet neither drive's visible contents come close to 20GB. I know, because - frustrated at not seeing anything glaringly large enough to account for such a chunk of space - I added up the sizes of all of the files and folders manually. All files and folders are unhidden that I can set that way, including using the attrib command in a CMD window.

Anyone remember what was writing/storing to the drive that was hidden from view? I think it was an easy fix.

How much space is allocated to restore point data?

Windows 7: Adjust the Size System Restore Points
http://windowstipoftheday.blogspot.c...m-restore.html
I usually turn D:\ off.

Only 6% (4GB) on the system drive, nothing on the storage drive.

I since found some culprits, I never deleted the old Windows files after 2 reinstalls and they were still sitting there. Deleting them freed up 15GB, and I got rid of some Paragon backup files on D:\ drive. It helped some, but I guess I just need to sort out some of the crap she has on that thing.:D

Hard to believe someone could load that lappy up so fast.

Run TFC - Temp File Cleaner by OldTimer

http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/files...r-by-oldtimer/

Had it clean up 4.4 GB for me. And I had to be real patient too.