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General discussion

Losing 1-2GB a day on C Drive for New Vista Laptop

by nousernameavailable Sep 26, 2008 8:05AM PDT

I have a 13 day old Gateway Laptop which has a 287GB C drive hard drive. After installing and uninstalling all the stuff i wanted on the laptop, upon getting it, I had around 248 GB of space, roughly.

Since then, i have monitored what my C drive says I have available daily. Each day, i am losing 1-2GB of space it seems. This is ludicrous and I have no idea why it is happening. I am installing no new programs, and have had no new windows updates installed during this process.

XP...never had this problem. What is Vista doing to my C drive that is causing it to eat my free space?

Vista SP1
Intel Pent. Dual Processor 1.87GHz
3.00GB Ram
32-bit OS

Discussion is locked

9 Posts
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possibilities
by ramarc Sep 26, 2008 8:20AM PDT

vista 'learns' based on your usage and creates a lot of caches/prefetches. also, your pagefile could wind up being adjusted based on your usage. if you've installed a lot of patches, the uninstall/rollback data can also become pretty large.

install and run CCleaner (http://www.ccleaner.com/) and let it do a cleanup. it could regain 800MB or more.

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also check the size of the AppData folder
by ramarc Sep 26, 2008 8:31AM PDT

under your user name. certain apps store a gig or more of data within those folders.

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System restore
by mopscare42 Sep 26, 2008 9:17AM PDT

I had that same problem when I first installed Vista.
In my case it was the system restore eating up a lot of disk space.
I now do a disk cleanup, click on more options, click on sytem restore and shadow copies and delete all but the latest restore points.
I do that every night and my C drive space now stays constant to what I know I am installing.

Wayne

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Just a note
by Jimmy Greystone Sep 28, 2008 4:08AM PDT

Just a note about system restore. It will only use a maximum of 15% of the total drive capacity, so while it may seem like it is consuming vast quantities of space, it does have an upper limit to it.

It does not appear to be configurable like it was in XP, where you could specify some amount of space yourself, but on the whole, I would say 15% is a reasonable number. Especially when you consider it might get you out of the occasional jam. The most recent restore point isn't always far enough back to eliminate the source of a problem.

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Vista making copies
by Jaynanny2 Sep 28, 2008 8:09AM PDT

My restore and c drives are overloaded to the point I have to boot up
in "Safe Mode". I purchased a program to delete all duplicate files and was about to send the remaining good files to my external hard drive so I could reformat my hard drive. Decided to look at the capacity of my drive after removing all the copies(I thought I had them removed) and the drives were again full. Checked the Picture/Document folders and there again found a load of copies. Is there a setting some where to tell Vista to copy my files. I have not made any such change.
Thanks for the info on installing XP over the Vista operating system and any help with this problem before I can reformat.77 yr. old southern lady!Jean in TN

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Have You Seen The Tip At The Top Of This Forum?
by Grif Thomas Forum moderator Sep 26, 2008 1:35PM PDT
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thank you all
by nousernameavailable Sep 27, 2008 2:28PM PDT

And especially Mop and Griff.

Mop you were right, it's the system restore...it eats away at HD space!

And Griff, your post was real helpful with telling me how to go about fixing this.

Thanks all!

(Opinion: Vista should really not have the system setup to do that...it's kind of ridiculous. And if they insist on it, it should be made easier to moderate/tweak).

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Thanks for the reply
by mopscare42 Sep 28, 2008 3:52AM PDT

I agree that Vista shouldn't do that. I think there is a command to adjust the size for restore, but I don't know the procedure so I just keep doing the disk cleanup routine which works for me.
Glad you have the problem resolved now.

Wayne

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check your virtual memory
by GENE8 Oct 3, 2008 5:35PM PDT

It's possible that you might have too much virtual memory allocated to the paging file in your C drive. Your paging file should be about 1.5 times the amount of your total RAM and no higher than that. So if you have 3 GBs of RAM, than your paging file should be no more than 3072 MBs. If you are using two or more programs extensively for long periods of time, your main RAM will get exhausted early and it will then have to borrow memory from your paging file. The more you keep running programs at this point, the more your paging file will be get used up, and that's why you're losing space on your C drive. You should defragmentize your hard drive routinely to retrieve the space you're losing because of your paging file.If your laptop is using lots of shared memory, that means that your RAM will get used up quickly if your video card is stealing a lot of memory from it. That's why your RAM has to start borrowing from the paging file so quickly.

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