vista using large ammounts of harddrive space

[kcc7800]

hello, im using windows vista and have a samsung 500 gig sata hard drive, currently it shows ive used 130 gigs, i dont see how this is possible as ive checked the separate folders and it shows ive got 30 gigs of games and about 31 gigs of everything else.

once i installed sp1 it showed the hard drive used space had reduced from something like 150 to 60 gigs but now its back to 130 some how?

has anyone had these problems? is there a fix as im sure i have not used 130 gigs yet, on XP the hard drive usage was about right.

i have another 320 gig segate IDE harddrive in my computer too

thanks

 

[rpstewart]

You'll have all sorts of hidden stuff that can't be see by simply checking folders - system restore points, hibernation file etc.

 

[crazyDAJT]

vista just takes a chunk of your boot partition/drive on a % basses. so the larger the drive the more it will reserve for restore points etc. better to partition the drive say 100 and 400 and install vista and all apps on your boot partition and all your documents on the 400GB partition.

 

[kcc7800]

yea it was system restore taking up the space, i back up all my stuff on usb and dvd so i disabled system restore and harddrive space usage has gone down from 130 gigs to 65 gigs
which is pretty ridiculous amount of extra space.

anyway thanks, much appreciated

 

[Borden]

To save a bit more space, then you can turn off hibernate if you don't use it. The only way to do this properly is from a command prompt window, so open up a command prompt and type:

powercfg -h off

 

[helmutcheese]

Hibernate will be fully off if you do a Diskclean up, the only real way do turn it back on is the opposite of the above CMD.

 

[Fire Wizard]

Hey kcc7800, it's most likely System Restore that is taking up some of your hard disk space. Vista generally takes up around 15% of space on your hard disk.

Now you can reduce the amount that System Restore takes up by using a very simple tweak:

Reduce System Restore disk usage:

By default Windows Vista allocates 15% of your hard drive to storing System Restore points - which turns out to be a couple dozen gigabytes on a large drive. The user-friendly Windows XP slider bar which sets System Restore space has disappeared on Vista; instead a little command line action is required to reset this percentage.

To recover some of that System Restore disk space, start up Vista's command line with adminstrative rights, and type, vssadmin list shadowstorage to see the current allocation. To change it, use:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[drive]: /for=[drive]: /maxsize=[size]

So this is what I use:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /for=C: /maxsize=2GB

This will limit the System Restore's drive footprint to 2GB, also remember though this limits how far back it can store points, so do so carefully.

Source - ***The Official Microsoft Windows Vista 64-bit Tips, Tricks And Tweaking Thread***