I posted this on CA and have had no replies whatsoever so I'm hoping to do better now I can get back in here

Last week I decided to get rid of some clutter in my PC and put most of my photos onto a cd and then deleted them from the computer, after which I was left with 9.87gb free space out of a total of 35.7.

Today I am shocked to find I now only have 6.8 free space, and have no idea where the other three have gone to.

I have done disc clean up and defragging, would a system restore back to last week give me it back?  I can't see that it would since I have only installed a couple of tiny games (which I also have on my laptop so I know there's nothing dodgy about them)

Any advice would be welcomed

fugem,

I would agree with Dave, more than likely this is being used by System Restore.    You can always delete all of your system restore points (except the most recent by doing a disk cleanup  then clicking on the Advanced Tab.  You should see a button that says something along the lines of, delete all restore points except most recent.  


Then you may want to limit how much space System Restore is allowed to use.  To do this, right click on MY COMPUTER, then Properties.  Then click on the System Restore Tab  Then click on Settings and adjust accordingly.


Also, 35 GB is quite a small hard drive nowadays.  I have a 300 GB hard drive and I still am running out of room.  

With the way things go and how fast technology has been improving, it gets very hard to make claims like that....but I wouldn't fault your son for saying that.

I mean, right now, in terms of size of hard drives, they are reaching  sizes of 500 GB to 1,000 GB,  and 1,000 GB is a Terabyte!  To me, that just seems enormous....but if we fast forward 5 years....who knows, maybe they will be up to, 1,000 Terabytes.

Horray!  

Always glad when someone gets the info they wanted...  

as far as the size you set your system restore at...Yes that should be more than sufficient.  I keep mine even lower than that.