New file appears and brings major fragmentation

[ethanmuse93]

Hi, I'm new to this forum but have been using CCleaner and Defraggler for a year or two now.  I've recently noticed something that is concerning me very much and wanted to mention it here in case someone else has had the same problem.

 

My laptop is running Vista home, 64-bit (I think).  Until 2-3 days ago it was using 150 GB of the allowed 450 GB on the C drive, showing the drive space at 33 percent.  Then, about 2 or 3 days ago, I noticed that the C drive was all of a sudden using over 190 GB and it was showing 23 percent fragmentation.  I ran Defraggler, but nothing changed.  I looked at the list of fragmented files, and there was one system volume file there that I'd never seen before, and the file was around 44 Gigabytes and had around 36 fragments.  No matter how many times I run Defraggler, the only thing that changes is that this file seems to grow larger.  It is now almost 48 Gigabytes and has 40 fragments, and it says my hard drive has 24 percent fragmentation.  When a few days ago the C drive was using 150 GB it is now using 199.7 GB and says the usage is at 44 percent capacity.  I am getting really worried.  I have run both Panda Antivirus and Malwarebytes with the computer in safe mode and they have both found nothing.  The computer didn't go online for at least two days until I came on a few minutes ago so I know it hasn't been downloading a bunch of stuff.

 

Does anyone know what's going on?  Is this something I should be worrying about?

[ethanmuse93]

Never mind.  It was just System Restore.  I feel dumb.

[hazelnut]

Don't feel dumb

 

Vista is a system restore hog.

 

Turning sys restore off and then on again can gain you gigabytes on Vista.

 

(by the way, if you do Startand then right-click on Computer in list and select properties it will show you what 'bitness' of Vista you are running)