Suddenly, there was no space left on my hard drive...

Got me a new laptop at work. Its hard drive is bigger than my old work laptop, so I'm storing my big files on it. The drive should have had well over 100 Gb remaining as of today. Imagine my surprise when the drive was almost full.

SpaceSniffer initially told me there was about 100 Gb of inaccessible files. Solution? Run it as administrator.

After that, I discovered the large files were one file. It was related to Windows Indexing, AKA Microsoft Search. SuperUser.com had an oldarticle on my exact issue. (It's on Vista; I'm running 8.1, but the problem is identical.) The upshot? Indexing went crazy, indexing everything I had and everything I linked to. For example, I have my old laptop hard drive mapped as a network drive on my new laptop. It indexed my old laptop drive as if it was relevant to the new laptop. That sort of nonsense.

Here's what worked, as per SuperUser.com:

1. Open services.msc
2. Stop "Windows Search"
3. Rename C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\Windows.edb
4. Start "Windows Search"
5. The directory rebuilds Windows.edb
6. Open Control Panel/Indexing Options
7. Click Modify
8. Uncheck Users or whatever else you don't want indexed
9. Click OK

Windows.edb is now < 74 Mb, down from 100 Gb .

Another approach, if you're not afraid of the administrator command prompt:

1. net stop "Windows Search"
2. del %PROGRAMDATA%\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows\Windows.edb
3. net start "Windows Search"

One more option (easiest, and least risk): Control Panel > Indexing Options. Turn things off.