Hard Drive is continually filling up

[ShutterbugMomTN]

History -- I have used Avast for years and the free version of Malwarebytes.  My computer is about 4 years old.  For the last year or so, it will not run when Avast is active -- it ties up the hard drive continually.   So I switched to Sophos and it ties up the hard drive continually so I uninstalled them both.  About the same time I was having trouble with the hard drive filling up, so I ran CCleaner.  I've been  using the Malwarebytes premium trial, but I am still having trouble with the hard drive filling up.  I deleted about 30gb of pictures a couple days ago, have installed nothing and I am down to 2 gb.  I am at a loss as to what to do.  I am running  Windows 8.1 (I tried to upgrade to Windows 10, but then neither my printer nor Photoshop Elements 12 would work so I went back.)  It's a Toshiba laptop with an Intel Core i3, a 500 Gb hard drive and 16 Gb of of RAM.  I use it for photo editing (personal) with PSE12, but I mostly use it for business -- Quicken, Excel, and Word.  I usually use Firefox and Thunderbird for my web browser and e-mail application.  Thanks.

[peter_callback]

Hello ShutterbugMomTN,

How much space was left (approx.) on the drive before the issue started?

[ShutterbugMomTN]

At least 30 Gb. Maybe more. It got down to 200Kb and at that point I went in an deleted at least 35Gb of already backed up pictures. And now it is down to 2Gb again. 

[exile360]

You can check to see what folders are consuming the most space using any of the following free tools:

• SpaceMonger
• SpaceSniffer
• FoldersReport

That should hopefully help you to determine what's going on and what it is that's consuming so much of your disk space.

[Firefox]

Another good tool to use for this is

• TreeSize