Question about my hard drive space...please help

Hello all,

I recently built a new rig and installed Windows Vista Home Premium (64-bit). I am using a Western Digital Caviar 640 GB 7200 RPM hard drive. It gives me 596 GB to work with.

My question is this: I have 32.6 GB of things currently installed. Its mostly games like Crysis, Half-life 2, Doom 3, and a few others from Steam. I don't have many other programs installed yet.

Every so often though, I'll notice that my hard drive space is less. It'll go down by about 2 GB every so often, sometimes multiple times a day. It tells me that 77.4 GB of space is being used, even though I can only account for 32.6 GB of it! Does anybody know why this is? Is it something that Windows is doing, like the Indexing thing that I know it is set to do? If anyone knows why this is, please help. I plan on bringing over my music library, which is pretty big. I just want to solve the mystery of my disappearing GBs first. Thanks in advance!

And if it matter, my system is as follows:

nVidia nForce 780i motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 3.16 (running at 3.23)
nVidea GeForce GTX 260
4 GB (2 GB x 2) OCZ Reaper DDR2
Western Digital Caviar 640 GB 7200 RPM

It's windows system restore taking snapshops of your files.

You can limit the amount of space allowed for this by using the following command:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /for=C: /maxsize=5GB

It's windows system restore taking snapshops of your files.

You can limit the amount of space allowed for this by using the following command:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /for=C: /maxsize=5GB

Gog

Thank you very much, but I must say, I'm not to sure where to type it in. I can really find what I would consider the cmd prompt like I would use in Windows XP.

Also, if I do this, is it possible to get back the space that Windows is currently using for this? Thanks again.

just type "cmd" in the "Start search" filed in the start menu to launch the command prompt.

It willl release the already used space (and the restore points already taken) that exceed the limit you set (in this example, 5 GB).

Well, when I enter that command line, it gives me:

"Error: You don't have the correct permissions to run this command. Please run this utility from a command window that has elevated administrator privileges."

I'm on the only profile that I have for windows, and its the system administrator one obviously. What should I do now?

Wow, that sure did it alright. I set it for 10 GB and now I am back up to having 554 GB out of 596 GB available.

What are the benefits of letting it use as much space as it wants? How much do you guys allow it to use? And is there even a way to set it back to unlimited?

Thank you all for your help! I really appreciate it. I am still learning about Vista, and I really had no idea what was making my hard drive disappear like that.

The benefit is that it will create more restore points letting you go back to a restore point further away in the past. By default, Vista makes a daily restore point so theer wil only be enough space for half a week worth of restore points with 5 GB.

To disable the shadow storage limit use the same command again without the /Maxsize argument

I tweaked my system to make a weekly restore point. This can be done in the windows task scheduler.

nm