Where did all of my Dell's hard drive space go?

Factual Questions
21

I forget exactly what my son in law said the program did, but it filled my 80 gig drive in about a year.

22

A 51 GB file would also take 7 days straight of recording with Audacity.

I think it’s more likely that the filesystem got corrupted somehow. Chkdsk probably would have fixed the problem, too.

Or some broken program is creating a log file with nearly 2 GB worth of data a day. You said you’ve only had the computer a month, right?

23

Correct.