HD space keeps shrinking a little each day

[a-10tankkiller]

Anyone with ideas on what might be going on with a hard drive that shows a little less space available each day? example: Yeasterday it showed 6.83 Gig, today it shows 6.7 gigs. I have actually deleted my Turbo Tax 2007 that was sitting here and it doesn't looked like it freed up any space. It has been doing this slow fill for a few weeks now.
I downloaded Malwarebytes program and get nothing, and a virus scan picks up nothing.
Yes, I need to get a new drive, and have one installed, but not sure if I'm replacing the whole computer(a Dell dimension 8300, 7 years old) or just the drive.
Any thoughts appreciated.
Thanks

[Prngr44]

Have you checked the size of the page file?

[a-10tankkiller]

It's shows an initial size of 768 mb and max size of 1536 mb. It's an 80gig HD and on a WIN XP system. Never really looked inot this so I don't know what it means. I'll start researching tonight.

[Markel]

System restore checkpoints?

You can set a max. space for (or disable) System Restore storage -- in XP it's from the Control Panel System applet.

There are also log files that get created by various software.

[Jeffbx]

I wouldn't worry about it. There are several windows services that randomly take drive space:

- swap file
- temp directories
- prefetch folder
- indexing

The only thing that I can think of that will slowly fill a HD over time is a runaway log file (I've seen this on servers before), but this would be pretty unusual on a desktop. As long as it's not filling your entire drive, don't worry about it.

Also - 7 years? This is a perfect excuse to upgrade. Forget what I said above - your computer is broken and soon all of your drive space will be gone and the computer will disappear in a puff of smoke. You might want to peek into the Dell outlet for an XPS 8300 - I scored an awesome deal there on a sandybridge i7 with a nice graphics card for $600 last month.

http://outlet.us.dell.com/ARBOnlineSales/Online/InventorySearch.aspx?brandid=2202&c=us&cs=22&l=en&s=dfh

[a-10tankkiller]

Yea, I have been talking myself into just buying a newer computer. I guess I'll be putting that motorcycle off another month.
I also have to replace 2 EVGA video cards in my home built. Dang capacitors popped. One card is dead and I can see 2 capacitors are popped on the other, so not long to live. They are 4 years old. Maybe 2 months for the cycle.
Thanks