Question about HDD capacity and sleep mode

Ive had my R61 running vista business for about 3 months now. I use my thinkpad as my college notebook, so it gets alot of daily use. I couldn't be happier with my purchase so far because it has been the perfect blend of performance, portability, and reliability.

But, my 160gb hard drive already has 60gb used up. I dont get how this can be? The hard drive never has said it has a 160gb capacity, it always says 142gb available. Why didnt the hard drive say 160gb capacity when i first got it? I have Microsoft Office Enterprise installed, as well as itunes (about 3gb worth of music) and i store all my professors PowerPoint notes on my laptop.

I use diskeeper very often to defragment my hard drive, but my disk space is constantly changing (generally getting smaller). I used the windows defragmenter instead of diskeeper yesterday and it said there was a 3gb file for storing the data my computer uses to put it into sleep mode. But it says if i erase these files sleep mode will no longer work.

I use sleep mode all the time, and im wondering if using sleep mode frequently will eat away at my hard drive capacity?
Thanks for any help!

 

First off, you aren't getting the 160GB because manufacturers measure a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes, while windows reads binary gigabytes as 1,073,741,824 bytes. Therefore, you're only going to have about 149GB of total space available on a 160GB drive.

So of that 7GB of space, let's say office enterprise takes up 1GB, and your music takes up 3GB. The last 3GB is probably your hibernation taking up allocated space, as it needs a file for the RAM to be stored on the hard drive.

 

How can i get rid of the older hibernation files that i no longer need?

 

it's a file called hiberfil.sys and it's re-used every time you hibernate (only exists if hibernation is enabled). Deleting it is not possible, just disable hibernation if you need that space, but then you of course lose the ability to hibernate.

SmoothTofu covered everything else.

 

But how can I have already used 60gb in 3 months? I have symanted endpoint protection installed, adware, spybot, a free trail version of dreamweaver, AIM, logitech software for my mouse and keyboard, printer software installed, and a good amount of various word and powerpoint documents that i use for school.

I just dont understand how that can take up 60gb? I have very few pictures saved on my hard drive.

 

Use sequoia view ( http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visualization/sequoiaview) to get a visual tiling of your hard drive. It will help you locate what's taking up so much space. The larger the box, the larger the file. Boxes of tiles represent folders.

 

Vista Business chews through Disk space. My x200 had about 25 gigs on the C partition the first day I got it, and it balooned to about 35 after I put on Office, Visual Studio, etc. I recovered some of my space by trimming down on the restore options.

I deleted the system restore partition using the included utility (backup to DVD, and recover service partition). This added about 7 Gigs to my Windows partition (made the partition bigger, didn't get rid of Windows data). Next I did an advanced search on my C drive and looked for any/all files larger than 100MB. I found several Disk images from Lenovo that I did not need (3-5 at 700MB each). There are also installers for all your drivers, thinkvantage applications, and a sample version of Office 2007 on your machine by default. Many of these can be useful and you definitely should archive them to a DVD BEFORE you delete them.

If you do all this you should be able to shrink your install partition. Although, I think expecting anything less than 25 GB to be used on a Vista Business partition with hibernate and pagefile enabled (both recommend by the way) is unrealistic.

 

I received vista ultimate with SP1 with my software bundle from my college. Does vista ultimate help reduce the use of hard drive space?

 

No, Vista Ultimate will use more space.

 

I freed up 20gb by simply turning the automatically create system restore point feature off. I do not need this feature because i have an external hard drive that i use to back up my computer weekly.

Does backing up my computer on the external hard drive do the same thing as the system restore point though?

 

Do you make images of your HDD or do you just copy files? If the first, that does the same thing, if you just copy files, no. System restore actually backs up the system, though admittedly it's a pretty useless feature.

 

I back up my files on a weekly basis, and backup my entire computer every couple of weeks. I do not know if im making images of my HDD or just copying files.

 

Do you use any special software to do backups, or do you manually copy stuff? If you use software, what is it?

 

I use the windows backup and restore center to back up my HDD onto a western digital 320gb external HDD.

 

Hi mghokie7

When you back up to an external hard drive, you typically just copy the critical files you need. It does not do the same thing as a system restore point. One thing you might want to consider is to 'image' your laptop with Acronis TrueImage.

By the way, I'm not quite convinced you should use up 60 GB in 3 months. Are you sure you don't have some downloads or perhaps Internet Explorer cache files or temp files taking up that space?

 

Well now i have 99.4gb available out of 142gb on my HDD. Is using 40gb unheard of in 3 months?

 

System restore comes in very handy at times even if you are cloning your entire drive every week. However system restore in vista by default eventually uses up to 15% of your hard drive, which many would consider unnecessary and excessive. Unfortunately in vista, there is no built in utility to allow you to easily change the amount of hard drive space system restore is allowed to use like there is with XP. However, for vista there is a simple command that can be entered in a command prompt that will allow you to set the amount of megabytes you want system restore to be limited to using. The exact process is explained here: http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/...rage-space-usage-size-in-vista-with-vssadmin/

 

I just dont understand how my HDD space gets smaller by about .1gb every day or two, even though i am not saving any new files onto my hard drive.

 

Ive been tracking my HDD space over the past two days, and yesterday morning it was 92.0gb. This morning my HDD says 90.2gb available.

Why is so much space disappearing on my hard drive without me downloading or installing anything?

 

Vista seems to just get a huge cache of clutter.
Run CCleaner and see how much space gets cleared up. For me, it's usually around 5GB.

 

http://www.ccleaner.com/

Is CCleaner safe, and is that a safe place to download it?

 

I use it all the time as do many users of this site. Look through settings to make sure it's not deleting something you want (like internet cookies if you want them).

And yes, that's where to get it.