T61p Defragment = More Hard Drive Space!?

Ok...this seems very weird. It's something I've noticed for some time now, and I am wondering if anyone else has also experienced such an oddity. Apparently, as everyone knows, HDD space keeps getting eaten up indiscriminately and randomly sometimes. However, whenever my HDD seems to be low in space, I defrag it with O & O Defragmenter and all of a sudden the amount of free space increases. WTF? It's been seen jumping fron 19 gb to 24 gb of free space. It's so weird....Explanations?

 

I'm guessing you have Vista?

 

Why is it that these things don't occur on my Vista system?

 

Because you probably actually took the time and properly tweaked/configured your system.

 

Yes, I have Vista Ultimate. So what sort of tweaking are you talking about that would prevent this weird space eating phenomenon?

 

Check out this post ctbear: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=167983

 

Ark,

Having a thinkpad represents some paradoxes for me. It is the first commercial system I've purchased. I haven't done a clean install but I have pruned and pruned and pruned.

There's a reason that I haven't done a clean install which is that the bloatware is full of interdependencies. If you aren't real careful by removing one feature, you'll remove others without knowing it.

Vista takes a lot of of undue knocks. I've been running it much longer than when it was released to the general public. I did a clean install on a really large bleeding edge system and I couldn't get it to install. During the period of diagnosis I learned a lot about Vista's new infrastructural features. It's quite the grown up and mature system in many but not all ways.

I've always removed restore pointing for disk space as I come from the days when a large disk was 2.5 megabytes and later a huge disk was 1/2 gigabyte so I'm conservative with disk space. I do use Complete PC backup and that is one impressive tool. That's the only thing on my system's that uses the Shadow copy service service.

I am always learning about Vista because there's a lot to learn but I do have very stable systems and systems where disk space does not melt away.

That was the reason I asked, "Why does this no happen on my system?"

Vista is the most sophisticated operating system in the ware in the world. Certianly it does more than many mainframe operatings systems. But where the things it does are feature rich, it also requires a lot of resources to do all the fancy dancy things it does. All of have decisions to make about the tradeoffs between features and what we are willing to pay for them in terms of resources.

I am not lucky with Vista. Instead I know enough to make those decisions - which in the large scale of things is not very much.

 

Ren,

That is very interesting that you say that. I can understand that each program/software can be dependent upon others. I have not tinkered with Vista enough to discuss the operations behind it but what you said really makes sense to me.

I was never a huge clean install fan. My clean install guide originated from my first clean install on my T61. I've had desktop computers of which I have only uninstalled programs to my liking. And although all of my computers have run very stable, my laptop so far has been very stable from a clean install. I don't have Vista running on either my desktop or laptop, but I do have XP.

I'm sure XP may not be as intricate as Vista and I guess I like that in some ways. I believe I was so confident in going forward with a clean install is because of the recovery discs, so that Complete PC backup that you mentioned sounds very intriguing to me.

One more question, what's the boot time with your system?

 

Please descibe your stop point in defining boot time. Is it Time to logon screen?

There are some interdependencies in vista. An example would be the already noted dependency of restore points on the sadow copy service. But I wasn't referring to Vista interdependencies, I was referring to bloatware interdependencies. I think the functions of the function keys are speard all over everywhere and I think they are easy to accidently eliminate if you aren't really careful. That's something I want to avoid.

Complete PC Backup fulfills a vitally needed gap toward the completeness of WIndows. A couple of weeks ago, my desktop had a memory failure. The symptoms were disk corruption which is impossible to avoid with memory corruption. I installed the new memory and was not surprised to find that my system failed at the same place in the boot sequnce. My system was failing during boot from a corrupted file. Complete PC backup brought my system back to life in about an hour and it's done that so many times.

With Vista and Complete PC backup, once you have gotten a system the way you want it, you don't need a recovery disk or a recovery partition because it's sitting on the two dual layered DVDs in your DVD cabinet. I find it to be something that has been so badly needed for such a long time.

 

From the moment you press the power button to your desktop with all your system tray icons without the logon screen.

 

The system is in use now and I can't reboot but I am sure that it's longer than 23 seconds. I'll get the number for you although I'm not sure it's meaningful. For example, in booting I have SQL server installed and that is part of the process.

 

One can set the amount of hard disk space system restore can use in Vista to whatever amount of space one prefers. By default Vista allows system restore to use up to 15% of the hard drive for shadow copies, which, imo, is far more than is necessary. But disabling system restore entirely isn't necessary to keep it from eating up too much of your hard drive. I have system restore restricted to using only 3 GB on my drive and if I start needing more space, I might cut it back further.

The link below gives instructions on how to configure the amount of hard drive space system restore can use in Vista.

http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/11/thankful_on_thanksgiving.php

It is a simple command line entry.

 

Ark,

Here is a partial answer to your question....

From hibernate time to full icons in tray is about 30 seconds with almost full bloatware and SQL server plus a lot of things that I have written.

7800 + Hitachi 200 gb 7200 rpm, 4 gb of memory - Vista Ultimate 32 bit.

 

Very nice rig!

Top of the line Core 2 Duo plus top of the line hard drive plus 4 GB RAM. Impressive. How much did all that cost? About 2k?

 

Actually it cost 2.8 and then I had to add a WWAN. But it is a maxed out t61p and I did that on purpose because I intend to keep it for a long time.