my computer works again! yay. less yay: when I took a look at the hard drive (C, I have two drives and frequently use D bc of this exact problem), the storage had gone down from 36 GB to 19 GB

disk cleanup only pulled it up to 22 GB

and yes it's a hard drive that's supposed to support 1 TB, but when I got it (NEW) some years ago it was half-full already. so like......the fuck, how did it fill up AGAIN

Out of curiosity, what antivirus/firewall do you use?

Microsoft Defender

which is pretty much the only one I use

I do also have Malwarebytes but I think the trial on that passed a while back?? idk I would have to check

All right.

I ask because mine had an issue a few years ago where it was creating multi-gigabyte files for some reason.

huh. I'll check and see if it's anything either antivirus did