Vista. Hard Drive shrinking gigs at a minute

[Clarko]

Ok I have been trying to figure this out because it worries me when I dunno what is going on in my comp. When I very well know I have knowledge the insides and outside of my baby. I have googled it and read articles. With vista it is system restore that takes up space from shadow copies and restore points. which I have already erased the previous ones and made a new single restore point which made my hard drive go from 216 to 260 gigs of my main drive free. Now it is at 252 when it was 255 earlier today. I also thought it was my virtual memory which is set to 8192-8192 since I have 4 gbs of ram. Also its 4 gigs total since I have vista 64 bit. I have noticed tho when I change my virtual memory back to default or system managed it doesnt change. Even if I choose ok to close the window. I believe that could be the cause of the hard drive losing so much space in such a short time. I havent installed anything major or downloaded any big programs. I have actually deleted some games I do not play with anymore.

Any thoughts will be taken into consideration.

Also please post constructive statements. I do not want to start with a XP is better because so so, or windows 7 blah blah blah. I have used XP and it was great. I use vista and its great now that it is supported right. Windows 7 is awesome but I am waiting till final release to get. Thank you.

P.S. Forum mod I realized I posted this in the wrong section. Can you please move to appropriate section of the forums. thank you.

 

[genpatton7]

I would recommend turning off system restore if you don't want to lose hard drive space. The problem is fairly normal, system restore can use 15% + of your hard drive space and there is no easy way to adjust allocation like there was in XP.

If you want to see exactly where your hd space is being allocated, try treesize

 

[goooooller]

i had this same problem, just turned off system resort and it freed up like 5gigs

 

[XXzz-Trauma-zzXX]

How do i turn off the system restore on XP 32-bit?

 

[Idol]

A bit off the mark, but...

I also thought it was my virtual memory which is set to 8192-8192 since I have 4 gbs of ram. Also its 4 gigs total since I have vista 64 bit.

Are you saying Vista-64 only supports 4gb RAM? Because I'm running 8gb in my sys. Or did I read you wrong?

 

[Clarko]

I meant Also its 4 gigs total because of 64 bit. I was prepared for people saying well if you have 32 bit you wont use all 4 gigs which I already know

 

[blizbiggy]

How do i turn off the system restore on XP 32-bit?

XP:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310405 (use method 2)

Vista:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/disable-system-restore-in-windows-vista/

 

[Rogue Sniper]

Moved To Tech Help.

Just sounds like Windows is making daily/weekly restore points. Try turning that off or to another setting.

My laptop (and desktop at the time) has Vista, but I DL stuff and Steam Games so that causes me to go down as for restore points Im not even sure I have that feature enable except for when installing programs.

 

[Mista Panda]

i had the same problem lol

 

[genpatton7]

System restore in-general seems to plague Vista systems, caused my computer to take 5 minutes from power-on to windows load bar every time I would boot. Ever since I disabled system restore it's been smooth sailing.

 

[Electrolite]

64 bit xp can take up to 16 Gb rams but vista 64 can take up to 128 Gb (all expect basic) which is impossible to reach lol.

 

[PhelanPKell]

System restore isn't going to help your situation, Clarko, but you don't have to turn it off completely. It's likely set to auto-adjust. If you alter it to specify a min and max amount of space, that should help.

Something else to keep in mind: Vista SP2 just came out recently and is progressively saturating groups of users down through the chain. SP2 runs a command during install that cleans out and alters some settings with some Vista files that waste space.

One other thing to consider is this page: http://liveslick.com/2007/09/03/is-vista-eating-up-your-hard-drive-space/
They have the commands to actually alter the settings for Shadow Copy, so you aren't forced to keep manually deleting files.

I hope I didn't cover anything anyone already has, as I did skim the previous replies. If I have, my apologies.

 

[Clarko]

Thanks for the input everyone. I believe a recent update is making vista continuously make new shadow copies without deleting the previous version. I have completely turned off the setting as everything i hold dear in data is on separate drives.