For the last few weeks, since mid-December, I’ve been battling a gradual reduction in free hard drive space on my laptop. I’d get the low free space warning, delete some stuff, hope that was the end of it. Get the warning again, uninstall some programs, hope it was done. I thought it was a virus, or maybe malware of some kind, but all scans came up clean.
Today I finally smartened up and searched for the symptom (losing free space on hard drive) and eventually one of the many pages and forum threads I find directed me to a program called Treesize which quickly and simply shows you how much space each folder and file on the hard drive is taking up. So I downloaded and ran it and I discovered that Norton has stashed over 13 gigabytes of virus definitions on my hard-drive. Looking into it it seems that since I’m running an older version of Norton it isn’t properly deleting the old virus definitions when it updates, and so I was gradually losing hard drive space. All I had to do was to turn off automatic installation and it stopped eating my hard drive.