running out of HD, webcam not working-XPS M1330

So I got my XPS M1330 on Tuesday, and it's been working pretty well. I had a technician come down to fix some stuff, and its mostly take care of. I'm still having trouble with my webcam. I have my webcam picture in my sidebar gadget. But when I open my webcam center, and it initializes, I then get the message "failed to start preview video, please reconnect your camera" . I had technician work on it, and he ran the webcam driver, and got it to work. I played with the computer for awhile and it still worked, I shut the computer down for awhile, and now its not working, but it does in my sidebar gadget. Anyone have any ideas?

Also, I seem to be loosing little bits and pieces of memory on my hard drive. I went for the 250 GB at 7200 RPM option. I have 220 available, and 9.99 for recovery. I assume 20 missing is Vista? The only things I've loaded is iTues, Firefox, AIM, 39.41 GB of music, and activated my Trend Micro Internet Security and Microsoft Office. Right now I have 145.93 GB of space left, and yesterday I had 147 left, the day before, I had say 150-160. I seem to be loosing small bits and pieces of memory left and right, sometimes .50, others 1 GB. And I'm not even downloading or saving much if anything! I've only saved one document, and a couple of sidebar gadgets. Should my computer be using up storage space? I can't imagine loosing GB's over a couple of days!

Please help me!

Thanks!

 

20GB missing is because of the "famous" drive size rip off.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte#Consumer_confusion

 

You may disable the restore feature. This will get rid of restore points, and shadow copies.

 

disabling restore sounds like a decent enough idea I suppose. How do I do that? Will I still be able to go and save myself every now and then if I choose?

 

I'm at work right now, so couldn't tell you exact.

Look for something like hard drive protection, and you have to uncheck on the partition that has the OS installed.

If you have vista ultimate, you can backup the entire hardrive, and forget about restore points.

 

Ok, I did that.

I also did a Disk Clean Up, and got 4 GB back, which is nice, so I have 155 GB left.

Anyone else have any more ideas? How about the webcam?

Thanks Achilles!

 

Just a word of advise.

I've used Restore when my previous laptop got infected with a BAD virus. I tried numerous virus programs, and while some of them identified the virus, NONE of them were able to remove it. It was automatically sending e-mails to friends and family in my contacts.

I ended up using Restore, and the problem was gone, never to be seen (well, by ME) again.

I've also used restore when, after installing something, or for no particular reason, my computer starts to act up. I restore to a previous saved restore point, and 9 out of 10 times, the problem is gone.

I personally would NOT give up the Restore function, simply to gain some additoinal space. Esp. considering how cheap external hard drives are, and also considering how much room you still have on your internal hard drive.

Just my two cents....

 

Ditto, itst great for testing questionalble software aswell as system impact of software. It runs slower system restore

 

Yea, I turned it off to see what I would get back, but I just turned it back on.

 

I can tell you this for fact, its not your restore thats taking your hard drive space.... it may take some at different points in using it but its not causing what you are talking about.

I can say this because when I first got this comp. (the 1720) I noticed that I too was glad I opted for a decent size drive because of the system.

I however do not have any music downloaded, no aim, and no itunes, but i do have firefox, and trend micros pc cillin installed as do you.

and I am having the same problem on the drive that the os is installed on, i started a thread here called "hard drive fluctuations" and some of the senior members and moderators told me that it was "virtual memory" i am not saying they are wrong but i am not sure about that?

oh and i took the restore function off of my comp because i dont save anything to the os hard drive and i have been losing space daily, it goes down by .gb at a time but it adds up, then one day ill get back on and it is back up there again, and then when using it, it will go back down. I dont know what this is but it frusterates me too. i am half tempted to get rid of pc cillin to see if this is it because it causes me problems on the sleep mode function as well.

sorry i rambled a little bit,its just frustrating, because i had a 160 gb hd and when i got the machine it was down to 130 gb and now after service pack 1 and downloading firefox i have exactly 95.88gb left, and i save all my files to usb drives, external hdds or my second enclosed drive!!!

p.s. i dont think i have a virus, i have windows defender running (pretty sure i do) and trend micros runs all the time, and i use avast to scan with as well.

again sorry I ramble

does anyone know whats going on??

 

yea thats pretty much my problem, I have defender running as well

It's all very strange.

 

do you have any other problems with pc cillin, like when you go into sleep mode (when closing the lid) it makes the system restart?

 

not that I'm aware of, I'll try it next time, and report back