Hard drive space being used up?

cgarcia5 · Jul 6, 2009

So i just got my laptop its a compaq presario and it came with 138gigs. Initially it came with around 119gigs and after awhile i started to see that it started to decrease like around a gig aday or when i left it on to long. I took it in and geek squad and they said i had a virus but i restored it and nothing on my trendmirco has detected anything. I run proccess explorer and i cant see anything weird that is poping up using alot of CPU and now after i restored it twice i think its slowly doing it again but i heard that Vista uses alot of memory stored in cache called superfetch is this the reason why i see the decrease when im doing something on the system or what is serverpack 2 the guy kept telling me that this could be the case also. Please help im trying to understand all of this

garysgold · Jul 6, 2009

Hello Cgarcia5,

Welcome to Vista Forums.

I am assuming that you are talking about your hard drive space being eaten up. Part could be from the pagefile or prefetch. Also restore points will take up to 15% of the hard drive.

Hope this helps.

Gary

Frostmourne · Jul 6, 2009

System Restore took 30GB from my 1TB desktop hardrive. Try turning it off, rebooting, and turning it back on.

garysgold · Jul 7, 2009

Frostmourne said:
System Restore took 30GB from my 1TB desktop hardrive. Try turning it off, rebooting, and turning it back on.

If you do this, I would recommend creating a restore point after turning it back on as you won't have any. Also keep in mind that system restore will stop at 15% and at that point will delete old points to make room for new ones. If you need the space, this is an option. If not I'd just leave it alone until I did need it. In other words, like unused ram, if you don't need it for other things, why not let windows use it.

Gary

Tinkerdog · Jul 7, 2009

garysgold said:
Frostmourne said:

System Restore took 30GB from my 1TB desktop hardrive. Try turning it off, rebooting, and turning it back on.

Click to expand...

If you do this, I would recommend creating a restore point after turning it back on as you won't have any. Also keep in mind that system restore will stop at 15% and at that point will delete old points to make room for new ones. If you need the space, this is an option. If not I'd just leave it alone until I did need it. In other words, like unused ram, if you don't need it for other things, why not let windows use it.

Gary

Plus, SYSTEM RESTORE will save your butt someday.. count on it! Don't ever turn it off!!!

Many the time I've installed a driver or software (or even a MS update!) and disaster ensues..... a simple SYSTEM RESTORE to a previous restore point and I'm back in business!!!

TheShadow · Jul 7, 2009

Plus, SYSTEM RESTORE will save your butt someday.. count on it! Don't ever turn it off!!!

Many the time I've installed a driver or software (or even a MS update!) and disaster ensues..... a simple SYSTEM RESTORE to a previous restore point and I'm back in business!!!

That's as profound a statement as I've seen in this forum and VERY good advise.

I test lots of programs and many of them are junk. Being able to quickly eradicate them without having to do a Ghost Restore saves me a lot of time and data loss.
So I wind up using System Restore more than once a week.
I rely on it so much that I run a script in my Startup folder to force a new restore point to be created every time I reboot my PC.

Then, when I do my weekly Ghost backup, I run a little batch file that deletes all the old restore points. That saves a lot of space in my Backup Image File.

Cheers Mates!
The Shadow :cool:

Hard drive space being used up?

cgarcia5

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