Windows VISTA Basic Question

Discussion in 'other software & services' started by TheKid7, Apr 24, 2009.

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  1. TheKid7

    TheKid7 Registered Member

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    If a Windows VISTA Basic SP1 PC shows a large amount of hard drive useage, what is the best way to go about determining what is taking up all of that space? Is there a freeware program that can quickly assist a person in making this determination?

    Thank you.
     
  2. philby

    philby Registered Member

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    AFAIK, Vista + SP1 should be around 5-6GB on your HD - that's without system restore points, hibernation and page files etc.

    One way for GB to be eaten up is by having 'too much' space allocated to restore points.

    I had the problem of my available space decreasing by a few GB per week and used the vssadmin command switches to limit the space used.

    Hope this answers at least part of your question.

    This might also be enlightening.

    philby
     
  3. Sully

    Sully Registered Member

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    I think I read somewhere that when you install SP1, vista keeps lots of files from prior. I think I even saw a tool somewhere that cleaned all that out assuming you were not backing out of sp1. MrGoogle told me where it was but I forgot.

    I don't care if I do have 1.5tb of storage, Vista eats a lot of space. 7 sounds much lighter.

    Sul.
     
  4. Kerodo

    Kerodo Registered Member

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    I think Philby is correct, and the reason for the space eating is Vista reserving space for restore points and related. A fresh install of Vista x64 SP1 off the disk, after one or two days, will be eating about 40-50 gigs of my 500 gig HD. I'm sure the OS itself is only 4-6 gigs max, so the rest is Vista apparently reserving restore point space based on the HD size. I would not be surprised if it reserves about 10% of your HD space for this.
     
  5. TheKid7

    TheKid7 Registered Member

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    The Laptop PC that I briefly inspected has a 160 GB Hard Drive (Unformatted size). ~120 GB of used disk space, Windows Folder ~6GB. After the owner deleted some un-needed files there was ~90 GB of used disk space. The owner reports that very little software has been installed on the PC and only some music (i-tunes).
     
  6. Stem

    Stem Firewall Expert

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    Hi,

    I recently installed Vista to have a play with the firewall. The only programs I installed where 3 network tools. After applying all patches/SP1 there was approx 35GB
    Disabling the restore/ hibernation and making cleanup this went down to 13.9GB. The windows folder is 12.5GB. Most of that (8.14GB) is currently in the winsxs folder.

    I do like the firewall, but I will not be actually using this OS.


    - Stem
     
  7. philby

    philby Registered Member

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    If you run vsp1cl.exe, you can reclaim a few GB but you're right - this does mean you can't roll back SP1.

    philby
     
  8. Sully

    Sully Registered Member

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    Oh yes, now I remember. It was built into vista. How quaint they actually thought to include that. lol.

    Sul.
     
  9. bonedriven

    bonedriven Registered Member

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    I bought my HP laptop 2 months ago. After these days's tweak,partition C is 15GB now. Can I make it to 5-6GB?

    Winsxs itself is 9GB.
     
  10. philby

    philby Registered Member

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    My winsxs is 7.5GB, but I don't really see it's size being an issue...?

    I just used vssadmin to stop system restore munching at my free space.

    You could tinker with winsxs but this might not be a smart move; see long discussion here

    I suppose you could also kill off hibernation and pagefiling but these are also moves that raise much discussion.

    Another thing I found was that you can use vLite to minimise the space used by your initial installation of Windows.

    Don't know if this helps...

    philby
     
    Last edited: Apr 25, 2009
  11. philby

    philby Registered Member

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    You can shrink the system partition using disk management - but would this be advisable if winsxs is at 9GB and you only have 15GB allocated to the partition?

    I'd leave it as it is so that there's headroom for SPs and other updates etc.

    philby
     
  12. bonedriven

    bonedriven Registered Member

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    I mean vista using 15gb while winsxs is 9gb (C:25GB). Image backup C now is a pain.
     
  13. philby

    philby Registered Member

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    Why is it a pain? Backing up a 25GB system partition shouldn't take long.

    Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean...

    philby
     
  14. Howard Kaikow

    Howard Kaikow Registered Member

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    GetFileTypeDistribution
     
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