Search help, hardrive is weird

[hitbychance]

Hey guys im usually pretty good with computers, i.e building them and setting them up but is there any way to view every file on your c drive in a list by size. My computer says its low on space but all i can find is 30 gb and the drive is 50gb, BTW its vista

any help is appreciated

[szh]

You are probably suffering from the Vista tendency to create "Restore Points" at the drop of a hat.

1. As Administrator, in Explorer, go to the "Computer" screen, select your drive with the right mouse click, select "Properties" and then select "Disk Cleanup".

2. Wait a bit till the "Disk Cleanup" window pops up. If you don't know what the items are, Deselect all of them - particularly the "Hibernation File Cleaner" since you may want that not to get removed.

3. Click on the tab at the top labelled "More Options", and then on the lower "Clean Up..." button (for "System Restore and Shadow Copies").

4. Click on "Delete" when a popup prompts you for whether you are sure that you want to delete all but the most recent restore point.

5. Then click "Delete" on the next confirmation popup.

6. Then click on OK on the previous two windows.

You should see a large amount of disk space get free'd up!

Z

[hitbychance]

finally got around to doing this :P, it gave me 7 free gb, thank you my kind sir

[APEXi240]

Any way to disable the "restore points" actions taken by Vista?

[szh]

Any way to disable the "restore points" actions taken by Vista?

I have to admit that I have not looked for a general solution, so I don't know the answer. I merely do the disk cleanup every other week or so to get the space back (my computer is heavily used).

In Windows 7 (the release candidate beta), it is managed by setting the size limit of the restore points, so it automatically truncates as needed. There might be something similar in Vista perhaps ...

Z

[szh]

Okay, I went looking. There is no way to get Vista to limit these restore points, unless you turn it completely off. Which is not necessarily the best thing to do.

Also, when you clean restore points, please be aware that you also remove Vista shadow copies and Vista backup images (if you use the Vista backup program).

So, if you rely on those for "version control" for files, or for backup (and also don't have some other program ... I highly recommend ShadowProtect from Storage Craft), then you want to be very sparing with these cleanups that I describe above. Or certainly do a Vista image backup (part of the backup/restore program) immediately afterwards.

Z