strange - hard drive having loads of extra space after restart

[The Passenger]

yeah pretty much as the title says.

i know there a lots of temp files and what not, and often i'll have about 50 to 100 extra megabytes (occasionally up to maybe 300mg) of extra free space on my c: drive after i turn my laptop off.

i downloaded some music yesterday and my free space dropped from about 5gb to about 3.5gb.... and today when i left uni i had 3.7 gb of free space on my c drive. turned the computer off. just got home, turned it on and have 12.9 gb of free space.... that's a huge difference.

what could be causing this?? could there by something clogging up my hard drive as i run it?? if so, i'd assume that could potentially cause problems??

 

[Nardz]

not really strange. i'd say its probably your virtual memory maxing out, then when you reboot it would clear.

i'm not on a PC at the moment so i cant tell you the exact location, but try right clicking my computer, go to properties, and i think its somewhere under advanced and/or performance or somehting like that..

if you havent figured it out by the time im at work tomorrow if i remember i can provide more detail..

edit: oh and i would be careful with what you change here if you don't know exactly what you're doing

 

[MisterB]

First thought would be your swap file is getting very large. How much RAM do you have?
What programs are you running when using the laptop?

What browser are you using? Do you have your browser automatically deleteing temporary internet files at exit?