Dear CNET members,

Happy new year, folks! I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday. My winter break from work was great, I got a lot of things done around the house and did a lot of bonding with my kids. It was great catching up with family and friends over the holidays. While the first few days back at work were a bit difficult, it's great to be back into the swing of things, especially with the CES 2009 happening now. So when you get a chance, check out CNET's coverage of CES, and see what's cool and new making its way into the new year. Now, let's get down to business and help Marie with figuring out what's eating up her hard-drive space.

Well Marie, your unexplained loss of hard-drive space is indeed puzzling! Especially when you have already taken some of the necessary steps to alleviate more hard drive hogs--like reducing the space on the drive available to Windows System Restore (which, by the way, was one of the most recommended actions suggested by our members). You've also made sure that your system isn't plagued with viruses or any malicious software. So what's next? After reading through our members' suggestions, granted that many folks mentioned things that you've already done, there are many other great suggestions such as checking your virtual memory settings, making sure that you're not saving programs to your C: drive, using certain utilities to help track down where large files are being accumulated, to even the possibility of Zone Alarm firewall being a culprit. Overall, you received a great deal of good advice from our members and I know it will help assist you in fixing the problem. So to get you started, check out the Q&A section with a few selected member recommendations. If that's not enough to go on, jump into the many other great member suggestions in the discussion. Don't forget to empty that recycle bin if you haven't already! Happy hunting and good luck, and if you have a chance please come back and post in the discussion thread to tell us what worked for you and what didn't. Have a great weekend everyone and thanks to all who answered Marie's call for help!


Cheers!
- Lee

Got suggestions? Send me an e-mail: messageboards@cnet.com

Featured member solutions
for last week's question:

 "Running out of free drive space"
-- Submitted by: waytron

 "Please try WinDirStat "
-- Submitted by: tonyny77

 "Eating up hard drive problem "
-- Submitted by: dumafach

 "I have a 16 gig C partition too "
-- Submitted by: djrobsd

 "What eats up disk space? "
-- Submitted by: TWLAAASx

 Read all member contributions

 Thanks to all who contributed!