[ryangelath]

I recently was watching my hard drive space available fast. So at first i thought that I had a spyware problem, then a faulty hard drive. But after researching I found that it was SYSTEM RESTORE that took up all my hard drive space. And it was just not my computer that did this, it was also a lot of my friends computers because I told them to follow these steps and it freed up anywhere from 10-90 gigs(60gigs for me) of hard drive space from changing your system restore.

But before I give you the steps I should let you know why Vista takes up so much hard drive space. What vista does is every time a program is uninstalled/installed/changed it sets a system restore point, and every system restore point takes up 500mb of hard drive space. so say you install a game, a patch, and 3 Add on's to the game. The game APPEARS to only take up 5gb, when really it is taking up 2.5gb of extra unneeded space. So this is what you need to do if you want to free up some hard drive space.

I am doing this because I have seen other people have had the problem with vista too. PLEASE BE AWARE YOU ARE ERASING ALL SYSTEM RESTORE POINTS.

1: Make sure you have windows VISTA :P
2: Go to your control panel click CLASSIC VIEW
3: Click System
4: At the Top Left Click System Protection
5: After hitting the Continue button, You should be on the System Protection Tab of the System Properties panel.
6: Uncheck the C Drive(THIS WILL ERASE ALL SYSTEM RESTORE POINTS)
7: Re-check the C drive to Re-activate System Restore
8: Click "Create" to create your first restore point.
9: Close all of the System Restore programs and go to my computer and see how hard drive space you have gotten back

[tacoman359]

I prefer completely disabling it and using Acronis True Image, which has more options, like allowing compression and having the choice of backing up to portable media or your hard drive instead.

[Elvandil]

Vista makes space available for System Restore points automatically on the basis of how much free space is left on the drive. It is not necessary, nor desirable, to manage it manually. If more space gets used on the drive by programs, then less will be allocated for restore points.

The usual method for removing old restore points is to use Disk Cleanup. It is on the second page and removes all points except the last so that there is no time-lapse in which you have no restore points at all.

I use both Acronis and SR. Sometimes the problem is minor and SR works great without losing any files. But Acronis can restore everything, though it loses everything that was done since the last backup.

[Woodham]

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/04...ystem-restore/

The first one seems to delete the points then start creating them again, but maybe i just read it wrong.

[cuttlefish]

Yep, I'm with Evandil on this one as well!

Disk Cleanup is the way to go say once a week but remember that you have to go to the OPTIONS tab to get to the "delete system restore points etc." - the first tab for Disc Cleanup won't get rid of the sys restore points.