What is taking up so much space?!

Hi, I recieved my dell 1520 a couple days ago... and it came with a 120 (7200rpm) hard drive. Only after 4 days the main partition (OS) has already used 30 gigs. I did not download alot of programs my program folder is up to 9 gigs and windows folder is up to 9 gigs as well. The other folders I have checked in the partition are small (1-100mb). Well 9+9 = 18.... 30-18= 12. Where the hell is this 12 gigs coming from?

 

Almost assuredly it's going into Vista's Shadow Copy and System Restore feature. By default it will use up to 15% of your hard drive. Unless you are running Ultimate Edition, you can't even access the previous versions of documents that are saved and the System Restore feature on its own is of limited utility.

You can find instructions to reduce that amount of space here: http://vistasupport.mvps.org/decrease_storage_space-allocated_to_system_restore.htm

 

Vista's version of System restore takes up this space. Go to Computer. Right click on C: Drive. Go to properties. Disk Cleanup.

Then, on the second tab, there's a clean up button for System Restore. Press it. Get out of that window then. Go to Computer and check.

You should have a lot of those GBs back.

I was also confused and did this and regained 15-20GB!
Sadly, I haven't found a way to limit the space Sys Restore takes, like in XP.

 

wow thanks that helped alot. btw phoenix shoyers link shows how to limit the space if you would like to try it. thanks for the quick replies! got 13 gigs back

 

Thanks shoyer. I tried the info in the link given and it works

I must say, Vista makes it hard to reduce the usage of Sys restore. I saw that mine had a max limit of 20GB!! That's just crazy! I got it down to 6GB, as I would like to have a few restore points as well as save a bit of space.