Recovery Drive Question

[Blakey]

I'm not sure if this is the right forum to post this in, so please move it to the correct area if not.

On my Dell laptop running Windows Vista (yuck), I've been getting this pop up:

Low Disk Space

You are running out of disk space on RECOVER (D: ). To free space on this drive by deleting old or unnecessary files, click here...

If I do "Click Here" the only options I am given are to empty my recycle bin (did that) which gets me nowhere. I've read that I can turn off the notification, but that doesn't fix whatever the problem is. I don't know if I should delete the old files on the D : or not (some go back to last year) or leave them. Anyone know what to do with this? Thanks in advance!!

[nuz]

Does Vista have something like Disk Cleanup? If you're not sure type in "hard disk clean up" in windows Help and see what you get. Otherwise try searching for temp files and delete ones that haven't been accessed in more than 6 months. If you are sure you won't need old files delete them. If not, but you aren't going to be accessing them in the near future, burn them onto DVDs.

[nuz]

Double checking my post I see that I don't know what you've got on D:. If you have any system files, backed up or otherwise, forget what I said about deleting temp files.

[Paul Komski]

The two common culprits with Vista are System Restore and Automatic Backup. Both (but to some extent dependent of the particular version of Vista) sequestrate such files in hidden system folders making it particularly difficult to find just where the space is going. And both can consume absolutely huge amounts of disk space over time.

You can view the actual space consumption with WinDirStat (http://windirstat.info/). Let run and compute and then look to see whether there is a large area of Unknown used space. If so I bet its due to automatic backups being stored away unbenown to you in the D partition.

Which version of Vista (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/features/backup.aspx) are you using?