Help cleaning up HDD

[95gsrturbo]

Afternoon,

I'm a bit new to the mac world I purchased my macbook Pro in December of 2010 and Ive had it 2 full years now but still havent learned all of the tricks on how to find stuff

I recently looked at Mactinosh HD to see how much space I had (considering adding Parallels and Win7) and it was really low. so I started cleaning up a bit, deleting files and moving stuff I needed to an external drive

my 13" pro is supposed to have 250Gb.
My HD shows I have 140GB used-
here is my dilemma- when I open the HD the files I see are as follows:
Applications : 8.5GB
Library : 10.32 GB
System : 6.07 GB
User Guides : 4 Kb (negligible)
Users : 74 GB

as you can tell this is not 140 GB-- more like 98-100GB at best so where is the other 40??

I would like to transfer it if I could but cant locate it

[GGJstudios]

Freeing up drive space in Mac OS X

If you're wondering what "Other" category in the Lion/ML storage tab is about, this may help explain:

What is this "Other" in the storage tab? What is eating my space

For space issues not explained by the above, there are a few things you can try, some of which may or may not apply:

• Begin by restarting your computer as a first step. This sometimes resolves issues.
  
  
• For Time Machine users on notebooks running Lion or later, space may be consumed by Time Machine local snapshots, which can be disabled.

  OS X: About Time Machine's "local snapshots" on portable Macs

• Check to see if some of the space is being used by your sleepimage file.
  
  
• Check the System Memory tab in Activity Monitor to check page outs and swap used. If swap used is significant, restart your computer and track that value under your normal workload. If you have significant page outs under normal use, you could benefit from more RAM.
  
  
• Search with Finder to see if the space is being consumed by a very large file or several large files. Adjust the 50GB in the illustration to whatever size you deem appropriate.

  

• Use OmniDiskSweeper, JDisk Report, Disk Inventory X, DaisyDisk or GrandPerspective to see how space is being used on your drive. Some of these apps may show more detail than others, so try several.
  
  
• Check your drive with Disk Utility: Using Disk Utility to verify or repair disks
  
  
• Try re-indexing your drive: Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes

Here are a few resolutions found by others with the same question:

• Encrypted drive
• Time Machine backup files and needed disk repair
• App filling log file
• App or file was 89GB
• Drive needed to be re-indexed
• Time Machine backup file
• Large app cache file
• Garageband files and video podcasts
• Oversized email being duplicated
• Another email issue

Freeing up space in Mac OS X

How OS X and iOS report storage capacity