Query

hi every body,

I Have windows 7 ultimate running on 1.5 gb ram,320 gb(4 partitions) westerndigitals HDD(on INTEL D915GAV motherboard).

Its been a month i installed win7 ultimate.I hadnt installed anything on C: drive which is of 60gb capacity.But the free space is decreasing day after day,its almost 46gb now.Since ive not installed anything into c why is the space being decreased?I know there are automatic updates installed regularly,but i am sure those few mbs files are not capable of taking GBs of space on C.Ive even cleaned disk and deleted restore points,but after cleaning it only free few MBs of space.What is happening here, its utilizing more and more GBs of space and when i use disk clean tool,it only free few MBs.Im terrified if the disk space goes on decreasing like this,in few months time the disk is going to be full even if i dont put anything there by myself.Plz can anyone make clear,what is happening here with my win7?

whs said:

This is probably an increase of your allocated shadowstorage. With each install and uninstall, Vista writes a shadow (restore point) of about 250MB to1GB - plus one is written each day. For that purpose Vista reserves 15% of your OS disk partition (in Win7 it depends on the size of the disk/partition) and allocates/uses it as needed.
Find Command Prompt (in All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt), right click on it and Open as Administrator. Into the little black window type VSSADMIN LIST SHADOWSTORAGE and hit ENTER. It will show 3 numbers:
Allocated - that is the amount that it has grabbed from your OS partition at this time
Used - this is the amount currently used
Maximum - this is the ultimate amount it will allocate and use
Once you reach "maximum", it will reuse the space deleting the oldest shadows for the storage of the newest shadows. With e.g. an appr. 200Gb of OS partition you should expect a maximum of 30GBs that are reserved for the system and that you cannot use. If your OS partition is larger or smaller, the shadowstorage will be accordingly. But the restore points (shadows) are required the day you need to do a system restore

very informative post WHS, thank you +1

pebbly and Cyber Zeus, Thanks.

whs said:

pebbly and Cyber Zeus, Thanks.

you're welcome

Oops Im late thanks everybody for your replies.

whs said:

This is probably an increase of your allocated shadowstorage. With each install and uninstall, Vista writes a shadow (restore point) of about 250MB to1GB - plus one is written each day. For that purpose Vista reserves 15% of your OS disk partition (in Win7 it depends on the size of the disk/partition) and allocates/uses it as needed.
Find Command Prompt (in All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt), right click on it and Open as Administrator. Into the little black window type VSSADMIN LIST SHADOWSTORAGE and hit ENTER. It will show 3 numbers:
Allocated - that is the amount that it has grabbed from your OS partition at this time
Used - this is the amount currently used
Maximum - this is the ultimate amount it will allocate and use
Once you reach "maximum", it will reuse the space deleting the oldest shadows for the storage of the newest shadows. With e.g. an appr. 200Gb of OS partition you should expect a maximum of 30GBs that are reserved for the system and that you cannot use. If your OS partition is larger or smaller, the shadowstorage will be accordingly. But the restore points (shadows) are required the day you need to do a system restore

System Protection - Change Disk Space Usage

Thanks whs I'll try your suggestion and let you know the results.

---------- Post added at 06:58 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:43 PM ----------



Here is the result ,system is not using much space