Vista - Limited Restore Points?

It has been bugging me: why there are so few System Restore Points on my
system (and on the one occasion I really neeeded it, only 1 - which was too
recent)

[System = Vista HP laptop, 100GB disk, System Restore having private >11GB
of its own disk space but 10GB still free, only C monitored]

Here's a partial answer that raises other questions...

I ran Cmd "as Admin", typed "vssadmin List ShadowStorage" and noted it said
the "used shadow copy storage space" is 10.871GB of the allocated 11.451...
which would explain why I currently see only 4 restore points in System
Restore...[wow... all the way back to 20 Feb]

But I haven't been doing *that* much! How come Vista [HP] is eating ~2.5GB
per restore point? Is it snapshotting the entire Windows system?

Even in theory this is close to useless when Vista creates scheduled restore
points once or twice a day (the 2 may have been an update install): since
Vista doesn't need to be restarted that often it might be days before a
problem is noted on restart... by which time any good restore points are
gone. [In practice it was totally useless...] What's triggering restore
point creation if there are no updates or applications
installed/uninstalled?

Is there any way it can be tweaked to gain a longer history... or, should I
turn it off, reclaim the disk space and use Acronis' "Safe Zone" and/or rely
on my external Acronis backups?

Informed advice much appreciated!

--
Julian I-Do-Stuff

Some Vista stuff, but mostly just Stuff at http://berossus,blogspot.com

Sytem Restore automatically creates a restore point daily.

To reduce (or increase) the disk space allocated, type (or copy and paste)
"vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=c: /for=c: /maxsize=6GB." (without the
quotes) Press Enter. Example assumes changing the space on
drive C to 6GB. Create a restore point immediately after resizing.


"Julian" <msforums@xxxxxx> wrote in message
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"Julian" <msforums@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:eMtLnRXdIHA.748@xxxxxxJulian,

Open the Task Scheduler. Click on "Task Scheduler Library" in the left
pane, then click on Microsoft and then click on Windows. You will get a
listing of the different applications you can schedule tasks for. Select
System Restore and then schedule it to run as you please, using whichever
triggers you desire.

C.B.


--
It is the responsibility and duty of everyone to help the underprivileged
and less fortunate among us.

Thanks guys...

Yes, I could increase the space allocated for System Restore but with only
10GB free I would get at most another 4 days history... and a completely
full disk for very marginal benefit (Vista is generally very reliable - I
restart on average only about once a week... so the span of the history is
crucial)

I don't need to schedule the creation of more restore points I'd like fewer,
but I've yet to see how to achieve this.

Any other ideas?

--
Julian I-Do-Stuff

Some Vista stuff, but mostly just Stuff at http://berossus,blogspot.com

Sorry, I have no other ideas.

When following up to a previous post, you don't need to include everything.
Snip out what's not relevant. But do include what is relevant. Some people
may have missed the original post.

"Julian" <msforums@xxxxxx> wrote in message
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