Journal --

So my hard drive has a maximum capacity of 275GB. For quite a while, because of the many video files I had, my hard drive had about 140-145GB of free space. I hadn't checked it in a while but had downloaded more files since then (though none of them were large files in terms of space, and the largest of them was deleted).

I checked last night and had only about 30-40GB left! After deleting a bunch of files that hadn't taken up that much space before (the majority of these files were already downloaded to my computer when my hard drive free space was at 140-145GB), I managed to get my hard drive free space up to 91.5GB. It SHOULD be higher, though.

I emptied my recycle bin, used the CCleaner a few times just to be sure, and have made little to no progress. I don't know what else to do.

I've checked programs as well as files and have found nothing that could explain the sudden lack of hard drive space. The only thing I can think of is maybe it has to do with my internet browser (I know internet history, cookies, etc can take up hard drive space), but even then there's nothing I can see that would take up THAT much space.

I have been doing a few things differently lately, and although I don't see how these things would effect the hard drive issue, I'll list them anyway.

1. My computer, an HP laptop, runs Windows 8. Lately, it's been prompting me to download Windows 8.1, and I have been denying it, rejecting it.

2. Adobe Flash asked to download the latest version today, which I also denied (out of pure laziness -- I do plan on downloading the update).

3. My sister's computer konked out on her recently, the internal battery having gone out. She looked up the causes of that online and found that, supposedly, the internal battery on a computer/laptop can die as a result of always having the computer/laptop plugged in all the time. So I've been unplugging my laptop lately to try and avoid that same issue.


Anyone know what I could do to fix this issue?