5GBs off my hardrive disappear?

[BaintPall]

so I have a really crappy hard drive it only has 30gb, it was full and i wanted to download a game so i deleted a bunch of big applications (mostly old games) giving me 7.5gb to spare, the installer to the game required 4.5gb so i downloaded that and after it finished i had 1.9gb left. so the installer downloads and it says its corrupted so im ****ed off at this point after waiting 3 1/2 hours for it to complete, so i erase the files it downloaded to my desktop and went to check how much gb i had left and it said i had 2.5gb so i did a disk cleanup and now i have 3gb out of an original 7.5, i went to see if there was anything in the add/remove programs that got downloaded from the installer but there isnt anything there, i also checked my program files and it didnt download anything there either, it seems as though it only downloaded the files to the desktop, which i already erased.
so to sum it up i started with 7.5gb then downloaded the game installer leaving me with 1.9gb then erased the game installer (never installed the actual game) and am now left with 3gb, .5 of which came from erasing my temp internet files. I'm thinking more pieces to the installer are somewhere on my hard drive but I have no idea where else to look, can anyone help?

 

[atomic tofu]

you actually emptied recycle bin?

how big was the dl?

could be your paging file is also varying itself, if so, set it to a fixed rate, smallest you can
go to system > advanced > settings....etc

 

[carnageX]

Could also try using CCLeaner, to get rid of anything that you missed. Could also try JDiskReport to see where you have the most space being taken up.

 

[Trotter]

CCleaner, and then a defrag.

 

[BaintPall]

alright I found the problem, turns out I moved the installer folder into my documents in the middle of the download thus copying all of the content in 2 places and thats where the 4.4 gbs was, thanks a lot for your guys' help! have a good day!

 

[a rock lobsta]

defrag woulndt give you any more space it would just make your performance a little better. defrag doesnt delete stuff it just takes files that have been fragmented and tries to put them "near" each other so the computer doesnt have to scan the whole drive to find bits and pieces.

 

[KSoD]

defrag woulndt give you any more space it would just make your performance a little better. defrag doesnt delete stuff it just takes files that have been fragmented and tries to put them "near" each other so the computer doesnt have to scan the whole drive to find bits and pieces.

This is not necessarily true. As you are right a defrag does that. It will show you that you can clear up space as the files and that will be moved and packed tighter onto the hard drive. Which allows you to clean more room for stuff that the system did not originally that you could clean.