vista installation size question

Hello:

I recently formatted my hard drive and reinstalled Vista Home Premium from scratch. After the installation was complete, I installed Office Home and Student 2007 along with a full installation of Visual Studio 2005. At this point, I decided to check out how much disk space all of this took. This, however, lead to the following puzzle.

When I check out how much total drive space on C: is being used (I have only one partition (C: ), and everything that I mentioned above was installed onto it), I am told that ~55 GB is being used. However, when I go one level down into the individual folders residing on C: and add up the corresponding drive space being used by all of them, I get a total of ~30 GB.

I cannot figure out where the extra 55 - 30 = ~25 GB of hard drive space is being used. FYI, I have explicitly turned on hidden files viewing in order to check that there wasn't a large set of files that I was missing.

Does anyone have any ideas?

The specifics of the folder sizes here are:

C: ~55 GB in use (determined by right-clicking on "Local Disk C:" and choosing "Properties")


C:\cabs 9 MB
C:\MSOCache 0 GB
C:\PerfLogs 0 GB
C:Program Files 4.9 GB
C:\Program Data 440 MB
C:\Users 276 MB
C:\Windows 24.6 GB
C:\BOOTSECT.BAK 8 kB
-----------------------------
Total ~31 GB

Thank you,

Aaron

You probably have a bunch of restore points taking up the rest of the space. Install CCleaner, or you can open an Administrative Command Prompt(search tutorials how to open admin command prompt) and use this command to set the max in Vista

vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /Maxsize=24GB

Just change 24GB to whatever size in GB you want. When it creates a restore point, if it would go over the limit, it deletes the oldest restore points until it has enough leeway to make a new one within the allotted size.

I can't find the tutorial on this site but this one will do the job:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/...th-administrator-privileges-in-windows-vista/

Ok. I changed the restore point reserve size to 10 GB, and now Windows says that only 48 GB is being used on C: (as opposed to 55 GB from before). This still doesn't make sense, though. I only have 31 GB of files installed (see my previous post), so with an additional 10 GB reserved for restore points, I should only have 41 GB in use. Any idea where the remaining 48 - 41 = 7 GB is coming from? Is there, perhaps, another type of system file (similar to that of restore points) for which Vista automatically reserves drive space?

Thanks again for your help!

Aaron

The total size of files does not equal the total used disk space. Read up on NTFS file system, clusters, file allocation etc..