Windows Vista Users Look Here.

I never really noticed this until a few months ago. Every day my hard drive space would diminish more, and more. I never really paid attention to it, I thought hey, must be my video clips, programs, and other stuff i do on my laptop, take up space. Little did I know there was more to it. A quick search in google the other night lead me to some well found knowledge about my OS.

Apparently Vista uses a crap load of Gigabytes for system restore, a Feature, I never use, simply because i don't do stuff to put my computer in danger. Since i don't use it i found it really unnecessary for Vista to take up 10+ GB for it. Those 10GB could be used for something useful for me such as videos, music, and games. Well luckily for me i found a simple guide on how to fix it, now Ive taken that guide, and added pictures to go with it for everyone else to use.

First Click Start - All Programs - Accessories. Right click on ‘Command Prompt’ and click ‘Run as Administrator’.


Then type vssadmin list shadowstorage


This will show us how much space System restore is using, and the max amount it can save.


Here it shows that the max amount of space it can save is 9.2GB, but its using 4.377GB of that. (your used shadow storage space should be close to the maxim shadow storage space, because i already done this before, i changed it to 9.2 for example) Now depending on your hard drive, its going to say something diffrent i got a 80Gb hard drive, and it says my max is 9.2. However TheShadyGnome had a 160Gb hard drive, and his max was over 33GB!

Regardlessof our hard drive space, depending if you use system restore or not, 9gb, let alone 33gb! is not even needed.

So now, im going to type in this command, vssadmin resize shadowstorage /On=C: /For=C: /Maxsize=#GB


Where i wrote /Maxsize=#GB Make sure to put the number you think will use, my suggestion is to use 2GB MINIMUM to be safe, however if you have a 500GB hard drive and its using like 67GB for system restore, just put it down to use like 15Gb of it. Basically Bigger the hard drive, just be sure to put a bigger reasonable number for max storage, to be safe.

As you can see, im telling it to the maximum size of my shadow copy storage space to 2GB instead of 9.2, this will give me about an extra 7.2GB of space for, porn videos, games, and pictures.


Just hit enter, like so, and you will see that it has successfully re sized the shadow copy storage space.

Thus like i said giving me more extra space on my computer for whatever i want to use it on.


Its nice going from having 1GB left to 9GB left on your hard drive. Or in TheShadyGnomes case, an extra 23GB.


Any questions, or advice on how much you should set the max space to, just post how big your hard drive is. If this has helped you say so in your post.

FH Vista Users Who This Has Helped.

• Penguinish
• Reynbow
• TheShadyGnome

 

Yea, it dosnt need to use that much space! i suggest lowering it to 5GB or 10GB, and you should be fine.