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General discussion

My HD is mysteriously getting filled up

Oct 7, 2007 6:07PM PDT

Okay guys i just upgraded to windows vista x64 ultimate a couple of days ago from windows xp. So far everything has been working great except one thing is concerning me. I have a 106 GB hard drive and now in only a couple of days its down to 80.3 GB. Actually just awhile ago it was 83 GB and now its 80.3. The only difference that i can think of between now and then is that i closed my laptop for a while and then i opened it again. I used Tuneup utilities to see what file was taking up all this space and the windows folder by itself takes up 39% of the space. and two other folders take up 4% and another one takes up 1% and another one takes up less than 1%. This only accounts for less than 50% of the space being taken up and i dont even have that many programs here. The largest program i have is open office and thats only like 300MB. I checked for viruses using antivir and i checked for spyware usign windows defender, superantispyware, and spybot and found nothing. I dont know why tunup utilities isnt showing 100% of the space and i dont know what's taking up all the other space. I'm new to vista and didnt have this problem with XP so does anyone have any idea of what's going on and how i can solve this problem. If it matters, i have windows vista ultimate x64, 1 GB ram, intel core 2 duo 1.8 GHz, and a 106 GB hard drive. I also frequently have my flash drive plugged in but i dont think that matters at all. thanx guys

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problem solved
Oct 7, 2007 7:56PM PDT

sorry for being such a noob with vista guys but it turned out to the the darn system restore. I disabled the feature so it wont bother me again. now i have 93 GB of free space which sounds about right.

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Reconfigure Restore instead
Oct 7, 2007 9:12PM PDT

I know it uses a lot more drive space in Vista. But it is a good life line. There are alternatives. Change the amount of disk space used is one option. But then you will have fewer restore points. Change how often a restore point is made is another. This will allow fewer points but you can go back in time more.

I think the amount of space used by System Restore is 15% of free hard drive space. After that older points will be deleted. You can view your size and even change it but not like you could before. Now you need to open an elevated command prompt with administrator privileges.

If your hard drive is filling up for no apparent reason check your Restore size. Log on to Windows as an administrator. In the "Run" box type "command" without the quotes. Press the Enter key. If "Run" is not enabled on the start menu. Go to All Programs>Accessories>Run or Go to All Programs>Accessories and right click Command Prompt. Click Run as administrator.

At the command prompt type "vssadmin List ShadowStorage" withoute the quotes.

With the proper syntax you can use Command Prompt to change the amount of space used by System Restore here.

The syntax for changing a given drive's shadow volume size is:
vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on= /for= /maxsize=
<drive_letter> is the drive letter to change the storage parameters for; <max_size> is the maximum size with a suffix that designates which units you're using (typically MB or GB). If you typed vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=c: /for=c: /maxsize=2GB, this would resize the shadow volume for the C: drive to 2GB. The changes should take effect immediately.

AUTOMATIC SCHEDULING OF RESTORE POINTS.

The default setting of once every 24 hours was to often for me. Even with a 300G drive 15% didn't let me go back far enough because each point took up so much space. So I used Task Scheduler to change it to once every 48 hours unless a Restore point was made for another reason or my system wasn't idle at the scheduled time. Just my preference.

Go to Start>Programs>Accessories>System Tools>Task Scheduler>

Click the arrow > next to to Task Scheduler Library. Do the same for Microsoft. Do the same for Windows. Click on the System Restore Folder on the left.

On the right click Properties. Click on the Triggers tab. Click Edit. Change "daily" recur every 1 day to 2 days. Click OK. Click OK. Close Task Scheduler.

Changing how often System Restore schedules a point via the registry is not something I've done yet but I have looked at it on my system. It looks simple enough. Just be sure to backup the registry first in case you do it wrong.

Click "Start">"Run". Type "regedit" without the quotes. Click "OK".

On the left pane expand HKEY LOCAL MACHINE and navigate to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion \SystemRestore.

Double click "RPGlobalInterval". Tick Decimal instead of Hexadecimal. Under Value Data change the number to a setting you want. The default setting is 86400 seconds or 24 hours. Changing it to 172800 will change it to once every 48 hours. Click OK and close regedit.


All versions of Vista take a lot of drive space to install. If you need more drive space don't disable System Restore. Get a bigger drive or revert to XP. If your using vista x64 ultimate upgrade your RAM too.

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thanks for ur help
Oct 9, 2007 9:36AM PDT

just one question though. How much ram do you recommend for x64 vista because the maximum amount of ram that i can have on this laptop is 2GB. i actually was planning to upgrade to 2GB though. Even with the 1GB the startup and shut down seems fast, faster than other people's x86 vista with similar laptop specs.

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2G
Oct 9, 2007 3:16PM PDT

2G would help when running resource hungry programs. Startup times vary widely depending on what programs people have loading at startup. Not so much as the RAM.

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Most new system have 2GBs
Oct 9, 2007 3:35PM PDT