Vista filling up my hard drive

garroff

I have got a 70GB hard drive in my Windows Vista computer. The hard drive is filling up and this morning I had to do a disk clean as it was nearly full.
My problem is I do not know what is filling the C drive as I store any work I do in the F drive.
Are Windows updates filling the C Drive? How can I stop this happening?
Thank you.

mp22

Try deleting a few restore points. also http://www.stenograph.com/HelpDeskDocs/win7/Limit%20System%20Restore%20Hard%20Drive%20Space.htm

garroff

mp22 thanks.
I followed the instruction but my screen appear different than that in instructions.
Also where will I find the restore points so that I can delete them. I have taken a screen shot of my restore setting screen but cannot post it.

mp22

Try this

Go to Start>All Programs>Accessories>Command Prompt and right-click command prompt.

Choose Run As Administrator, click Continue to accept the UAC prompt, and then type this command:

vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=1GB

Press Enter to execute the command and then type Exit (then press Enter again) to close the command prompt window.

You can change the 1GB to what ever you want.(1gb will probaly only leave 1 or 2 restore points on the hd) You can copy and paste the above if you want a 1gb limit.

garroff

mp22
thanks for your help. I will try this.
Can I ask you how many programmes do I "need" on my c drive. A lot of programmes have built up over the years but I do not know which ones are are essential.

donegal.

you can use this site to get rid of programs you don't need.


http://www.pcdecrapifier.com/

garroff

Many thanks donegal

Freddy Smelly

70gb hard drive is really too low for vista / win 7

you must have feck all space for a decent size page file. (virtual memory)

i'd check your drive partition manager to see if your drive has some unpartitioned space

to do this go to control panel > administrative tools > computer management > storage > disk management to check the real size of your hard drive and if you have loads of unpartitioned/unallocated space let us know so we can help you increase the space available to you

garroff

c 69.25
F 456 ....9.77 UNALLOCATED

"my computer" shows/reads 178free in F drive.
Thanks for your help

Freddy Smelly

look around for partition magic or similar tools to be able to add that unallocated space to your c drive

Torqay

Freddy Smelly wrote: »

look around for partition magic or similar tools to be able to add that unallocated space to your c drive

Only if you know exactly what you're doing. You may not want to **** up your recovery partition. Besides, 8-10 MB unallocated space is normal and this cannot be allocated.

Looks to me like a ordinary 80 GB HDD, which were not uncommon in the early days of Windows Vista.

Freddy Smelly

op is it 9gb free or 9 mb free?

honestly though if its only 9mb free then torquay is right... hard drives are cheap these days

1tb drive costs less than 100 euros... get norton ghost and clone your 80bg drive onto the 1tb drive then remove the 80gb drive and replace it with the 1tb drive and your sorted

garroff

yes 178 Gb spare in F drive.
Last time I tried to transfer some of this to C drive all I got was the 9.77 in the Fdrive. I seem to create another partition in the F drive.

Freddy Smelly

garroff wrote: »

yes 178 Gb spare in F drive.
Last time I tried to transfer some of this to C drive all I got was the 9.77 in the Fdrive. I seem to create another partition in the F drive.

ok it looks like you have have a 232gb drive partitioned into 2 drives c and f

if you have stuff stored on f drive copy it to an external drive. then use norton ghost to make a disk image of your c drive and store it on your external drive

then unplug your external drive and using your windows disk go into setup mode and delete both partitions on the internal drive then reformat as one single partition 232gb

then once done cancel windows setup and load your norton ghost boot cd and boot into norton ghost an restore the image you made onto the c drive and you now got 232gb c drive... then copy all the stuff you had on f drive (now stored on your external drive) to the c drive and your done

garroff

Freddy
many thanks for taking the time to help. I doubt if I have the technical competence to do as you outlined. Would it be easier to buy a replacement harddrive ?.
If I replace the harddrive will it start filling up again and in a few months would I be back to square one?.
Please give me your opinion on this.

Torqay

Rather than keep us guessing, open the device manager and post the HDD model (you'll find it under Disk Drives).

garroff wrote: »

I doubt if I have the technical competence to do as you outlined. Would it be easier to buy a replacement harddrive ?

If you believe moving files/folders to another partition is a challenge, wait until you have to reinstall Windows, which you will have to do if you want to buy a bigger hard drive.

garroff

Torqay

WDC WD 50 00AAKS-00TMA SCSI DISK DEVICE
WDC WD 74 0GD-00FLA2 SCSI DICK DEVICE

Torqay

Well, apparently you have 2 hard disk drives in your computer, a 500 GB (7k2 rpm) and a 120 GB (10k rpm), Vista probably being installed on the smaller but faster one.