Where has my drive space gone?

Hey all,
I appreciate all the help through the years. I have a new XPS 1530, with vista Home Premium, on a 200gb/7200 rpm drive. I have not done a clean install, so it is as Dell sent it to me, less a few bloatware removals I did initially. I am a little intimidated by doing a clean install. I upgraded, after the purchase, to Ultimate, so maybe I should do it then? My real question is: My C drive shows 100 gb free out of 173 gb total. I guess the OS is taking up a good part of the first 27 gb (200 - 173), but I only have about 23 gb of data that I have put onto this thing. Where is the other 50 gb going to? I am baffled. Can anyone help me figure this out before I have to go to Dell for help? Thanks in advance.

Randy / Painthouse

 

173 GB - 9 for Vista - 23 for your data - x for bloatware - x for shadow files - x for restore images.

 

I recovered close to 20gigs be reducing the allocation cap for restore images. My machine was making daily backups, which were sucking up space and fragmenting my hard drive. Reduced the allocation to 4 gigs.

To change default:
1. Open the Start Menu.
2. In the white line (Start Search) area, type cmd.
3. Right click cmd (at top), and click Run as administrator.
4. Click Continue button for UAC prompt.
5. In command prompt, type vssadmin list shadowstorage and press Enter.
6. To change, type:
vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /Maxsize=3GB and press Enter.

NOTE:
/For= Your main drive (EX: C: )
/On= Destination drive of backup
Maxsize= Size you want to limit it to, # + GB or MB

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/76227-system-restore-disk-space.html

 

very intresting tip. Can you give me some details on what this actually does and does it improve your disc read/write access times. please explian the benefits of this. As I want to squeeze every nano second of peformnce from my machines.

Thanks in advance I look forward to your reply.

 

All this actually does it change the amount of space allotted to backups. The default is 15% of your system's hard drive at the time it was set, if I recall correctly. You can change the number to anything you want. I have a 250Gb hard drive, and personally thought that 37 gigs was a complete waste. I think each back up is about 700-900 megs.

I don't have any hard numbers on the actual impact that the fragmentation of your hard drive has, but two things to consider:

1) Data written at the beginning of the disc platters (at the center) are read more quickly than those at the end. So reducing the amount of space written keeps data in the faster zone.

2) Each backup is written to a new area (after which the old data points are discarded). This leads to data fragmentation. However, defragging regularly can avoid this.

 

thanks i will try to changed my setting. Why in the world would they leave the default at 15%

 

I am sort of ignorant of some terms used. What are 'restore images' and 'shadow files' ? I have about 21 gigs of pictures ( I am a custom painter), so do 'restore images' tie into a large amount of pictures, or other things as well?

Randy / Painthouse

 

I like to know too. I'm assuming these are backup or copies of the pictures... right?

 

Thank you, i also used this, before now i was just deleting my old shadows and keeping the new ones using the clean tool.

If when i reformat i want to just keep a shadow of my system when i was clean, would i take the shadow and then turn the option of it automatically taking new points off?

 

I asked a similar question a while back. Check out my thread:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=216625

Go down to Greg's post.

Hope that helps.

 

thanks so much, it makes alot more sense now. Take care all.

Randy / Painthouse