~pcwiz Posted August 2, 2008 Share Posted August 2, 2008 Is your hard drive space disappearing every time you boot into Vista? It did for me, and I took alarm when my 127GB Vista partition suddenly had 39GB left. After doing a bit more research, I found out that Vista stores old versions of files, or "Shadow copies" which function similar to Time Machine, except they clog up your boot drive rather than being stored on a dedicated backup partition. Here is how you clear out this stuff: 1) Open the Disk Cleanup tool, choose cleanup for all users, choose your drive, then once it finishes analyzing the disk and the cleanup dialog pops up, click the "More Options" tab 2) Where it says "System Restore and Shadow Copies" click the Clean Up button, accept the warning and it will start cleaning. Once your system becomes responsive again, and you can hover over the buttons in the cleanup dialog, that means that its done 3) Open "Computer", right click any empty space and click Properties 4) In the dialog that pops up, click on Advanced System Settings from the left nav menu 5) In the dialog that pops up after that, click on the "System Protection" tab 6) Wait for it to detect your disks (may take a bit) 7) Any disk that has a check next to it, uncheck. You will get a warning that you will lose all your restore points except the current one. Now click the Apply button and wait a bit. It might look like it's done, but it usually takes a few minutes before you see any space being freed up. 8) Once you get your free space and it's done, you can check the checkboxes back to reenable system restore and shadow copies (just to be safe) This method freed up about 20GB of hard drive space for me, and the more stuff you have on your hard drive, the more your savings will be. Hopefully this solves any problems for people who are having a vanishing disk space issue in Vista... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
FrankOS_Scripting Posted August 2, 2008 Share Posted August 2, 2008 Thanks pcwiz! I'll be taking notes on this tips for the future. And btw, also another trick on Vista (also on XP). Desactivate the system restore. That's making slower your pc if you had large disk space. And Trojan make it an honeycomb on the restore. FYI:) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3Dman Posted August 2, 2008 Share Posted August 2, 2008 OMG !!! 20 GB 20 GB is my XP partition size . I've a program called Tuneup utilities that remove this {censored} automatic Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
~pcwiz Posted August 2, 2008 Author Share Posted August 2, 2008 It doesn't happen on XP, XP just creates relatively small System Restore files, but that's it. Vista's shadow copies take up gigs. Personally I don't use "tune up" utilities on Windows as they seem to do more bad than good. If anything needs tweaking, I usually use the manual method, the only tweakers I use are TweakVI and CCleaner (CCleaner can't even be considered a tweak util cause all it does is remove the crud on your system) FrankOSScripting, yeah I've had the problem tons of times where a virus sneaks its way into a restore point. My anti virus picks it up, it gets deleted, but the funny thing is, if you delete one restore file all the other restore files get corrupted. Isn't that convenient when a virus has infected your restore points, and you have to use restore to get back to a time when there wasn't a virus, but you end up having the virus anyways And then you try to delete the virus from the restore point and all your points get corrupted leaving you nowhere to go. I don't typically disable System Restore, as it does come in useful sometimes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scj312 Posted August 2, 2008 Share Posted August 2, 2008 Why would you want to get rid of shadow copies? This thing has saved my ass many times Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
3Dman Posted August 2, 2008 Share Posted August 2, 2008 I think if you use a backup program like Norton Ghost you don't need shadow copies, And Windows create shadow copies on C Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChocolateJeff Posted August 4, 2008 Share Posted August 4, 2008 Lucky me I found this out early.. and disable it IMMEDIATELY after I installed Vista on my Macbook (Don't say yuck.. I'm an engineer.. I need it) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
~pcwiz Posted August 13, 2008 Author Share Posted August 13, 2008 Why would you want to get rid of shadow copies? This thing has saved my ass many times Frankly, I've been used to XP too much to take advantage of Shadow Copies so I disabled it. The annoying this is that when you disable Shadow Copies you also disable System Restore, which has saved me several times. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
$tealth Posted August 14, 2008 Share Posted August 14, 2008 Another reason for the space hogging in vista is saving of multiple files of in the folder C:\Windows\Winsxs which is so called "Microsoft DLL hell" .....I was able to strip it down . Now my vista is loaded under 5.5 gig (pagefile.sys on a different partition) Though I am having a Quad Boot on the laptop Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Colonel Posted August 14, 2008 Share Posted August 14, 2008 Another reason for the space hogging in vista is saving of multiple files of in the folder C:\Windows\Winsxs which is so called "Microsoft DLL hell" .....I was able to strip it down . Now my vista is loaded under 5.5 gig (pagefile.sys on a different partition) Though I am having a Quad Boot on the laptop 5.5GB? That's nothing! Take a look at mine. :censored2: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scj312 Posted August 14, 2008 Share Posted August 14, 2008 5.5GB? That's nothing! Take a look at mine. :censored2: Mine's not that big O_O Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nickhe Posted August 15, 2008 Share Posted August 15, 2008 had the samething on my xbox 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
$tealth Posted August 17, 2008 Share Posted August 17, 2008 @Colonel and Meowy, I was able to delete the multiple copies under the Winsxs folder speciafically dated from Nov 2006 and nov 2007 .... and deleted the copies from the Windows Media sample and etc . I was able to strip down and working OS VISTA Whole Operating system under 5.5 gig ... Follow the guide from these website _http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=271701 _http://hosted.filefront.com/jisaac Flying Greets and help to Jisaac for the useful guide and help. Vista Sucks big big time MAC Leopard is more stable and lovely than Vista . Refer the Picture for further explanation. Windows Vista x32 Ultimate Edition Use vsp1cln.exe to remove the windows Vista Sp1 installation files and use the Vista junk cleaner file to take care of the temp files Follow this guide _http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/08/31/windows-vista-system-junk-cleaner/ With Regards, $tealth Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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