Sir Arun

So I have my new machine (Windows Vista Home Premium 64-Bit SP1) since about two weeks, and was busy installing stuff into it from my old computer. To do this, I basically used to methods:

1) copy all my personal data from my external hard drive (about 115 GB)
2) install all my games (about 30GB)
3) I know what the Vista OS occupies roughly 30 GB

Anyways, so I checked my Hard drive (1 TB, actual space is 931 GB) and it reads that 663 GB remain (thus 268 GBs are occupied).

But after adding together all the GBs of my stuff (Personal Data folders + Windows folder + Program Files folder) I have a total of 140 GB.

So my question is...where did the extra 130ish Gigabytes come from? I cannot locate them! There is one other person registered to this computer, but that is only 2-3 GBs of extra data, as the person barely uses my computer and is on a holiday now, so hasn't gotten hold of my new comp yet.

Any help appreciated!
Cheers

Sir Arun

I downloaded, installed and ran WinDirStat and this is the picture I got (I have opened the properties of my harddrive on the right to show how the data doesn't match. Yes, I run a German OS). And no, I haven't partitioned my hard drive.

Lead3

Hi,
Check the ammount alocated for system restore and shaddow copies. The default will allow up to 15% of the disk size.
Open an elevated command prompt (right click the command promt icon and Select
"Run as administrator")
Type vssadmin list shadowstorage
and press Enter

There is also a pagefile (ususally equal to you RAM size) and a hibernate.sys file that is also about the size of you total RAM or more.

Sir Arun

PROBLEM SOLVED WOHOOO!!!!!!!

I disabled Vista's extremely annoying System Restore point function. I have a 1TB external hard drive and will copy all my data to it (overwriting old ones, of course) once per month, so I don't really need it.

Here's the link how to (you don't need cmd to do this):

System Resroe Point hard drive muncher

Lead3

I am glad you got it solved although system restore is mostly to allow you reset to an earlier time on your system in case something happens, e.g. bad install etc.

Sir Arun

Yeah

Is there actually a way to tell Vista that it should only create ONE system restore point at a time and when creating a new one, should replace the old one instead of creating multiple ones, thus consuming a lot of space (which then have to be manually deleted except for the most recent one, time and time again)?

Lead3

Unfortunately you can't just set it to store one point but you can limit the storage size. See this article. I just let it be unless I start to run out of space.

http://bertk.mvps.org/html/diskspacev.html