Hard drive space keeps decreasing?

Just got my m1330 on monday and then on tuesday I installed 64 bit vista ultimate over vista 32 bit that came with it (not a clean install). Now everyday I look at my hd space and it keeps going down a little every day even though I am not installing or downloading anything. I have a 160 gb hd 7200 rpm and right now I only have 97.4 gb, after installing vista 64 bit I had 103 which wasn't to bad as I thought the os took up alot of space. But now in two days I have lost 6 gb without putting anything on.

Help please, thanks

 

have you been making system restore points! as they take up a lot of space.

 

Not that I know of although it can make them on its own right? How can I delete and disable system restore also I have been reading about something with shadow that takes up space in vista how can I disable this? Also anything else you guys can think of would be aprreciated.

 

Check out the system restore points. Look into the wonderful thread by Les here http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=166532 You can delete the system restore points except the most recent one by following the instructions on that thread. Its pretty easy and simple. Also you can turn off system restore points completely, but since you said you just got a new system, I would suggest cleaning it up once in a while rather than turning it off completely. Also do the disk clean up and take a look at < POINT 24 > in Les' thread Good luck.

 

You should really have done a clean install. There is probably alot of useless programs on your system you will never use

 

BTW - you may find system restore and shadow copy to come in handy someday and it will stop itself at some point (I believe I read no more than 15% of available space). I have plenty of space so it is not a problem with me and I also clean it up every week before I do a backup. You can turn it off if you want to, but I find it useful to have a backup option in case there is a problem.

 

I also have alot of space so i'm not exactly worried about I was just like why does my harddrive keep losing space when I am not doing anything, first time I ever saw it. Also I did disk cleanup and I got 14gb back so that was a plus, 11 of it came from "previous windows installation".

 

The memory that is being used is going towards the system restore just delete that by going to disk clean up and there should be an option to delete your saved system restore. Also, I think you can delete windows previous files. I never deleted it cause i didn't know what it was but you can do some research on it.

 

Someone is secretly DLing porn on your computer.

 

lol maybe to bad I can't see it.

 

You can try Reduce System Restore's Disk Usage in Vista. I make this and works:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/reduce-system-restores-disk-usage-in-vista/

 

I fixed it, I turned system restore off and my hd went from 105gb to 120gb and it is not going down anymore.

 

I strongly suggest you turn it on but just limit the space to 2-3gb. If something goes wrong later down the road, you wont be able to revert back.

 

I prefer to create my own backup images onto my external HDD.

 

In XP there was a way to limited System Restore's max space in the GUI, I was wondering how to do this in Vista, so thanks. I gained about 25GB of HDD space by limiting it to 4GB (it was limited to about 30GB before).