Im going back to Vista...

[Jacee]

Some brands of computers have a hidden folder, such as Lenovo (ThinkVantage) .... Rescue and Recovery - RRbackups. This can take up to 10GB of your hard Disk. If you're doing daily backups, you might want to uncheck that feature.

 

[TGSoldier]

He needs to specify how much space he has allocated to the Partitions...

For all we know he could have split an 80GB Hdd.. LOL >.>

Disable System Restore and Hibernation..

 

[Snufffed]

Heres why, on the 29th August I would have been running Vista on this laptop for exactly a year. I have two partitions, one for my OS and one for everything else. At the minute my Windows 7 partition has a red bar underneath it, meaning im running out of space. I never got this with Vista even with the huge amount of programs installed along with a few GB of pictures, documents, music, videos, etc. Something which I have not much of in 7, definitely nowhere near the amount I had on Vista.

So whys it taking up so much space? My point is I had Vista for almost a year and I never was close to running out of space on my OS partition yet ive had 7 for a few weeks, its ridiculous.

Rant over.

Discuss

You can disable the "Low space notice" or you can clean the restore points, and trash, or expand the partition. Have you considered the partition space difference of Vista to Win7. Actually I consider Win7 to be more like Vista SP3.
How much space is allocated for Vista?
how much space is allocated for Win7?

 

[Exodus]

My bad, I had Adobe Master Suite on the HDD without realising, but still, it means that the OS is 30GB in size!? Im running 64-bit where as I was running 32-bit Vista before.

Also, im not going back to Vista because this takes up a lot of space. I dunno why, I just preferred Vista, 7 doesnt seem that much faster and I really liked Vista. I do need to buy a new HDD because mine came with the laptop and is only 160GB. But im getting a Mac soon and ill be using that more then this.

 

[pparks1]

But im getting a Mac soon and ill be using that more then this.

Well, no arguing against that. After paying the "Apple Tax" you better want to use that Mac.

 

[Orbital Shark]

Windows 7 when clean installed is only 8-10GB in size. Certain programs/apps will create restore points when installed so this can take up a lot of HDD space. I would advise, if you intend on using 'System Restore', deleting all but the most recent restore point

   Note

Run Disk Cleanup as administrator -> 'More Options' tab, then Clean up Restore & shadow copies

Also, I've noticed that Windows Vista/Se7en will allocate about 1.5x your memory as a page file (e.g. 4GB can equal a 6GB page file) so it may be worth reducing that for higher memory computers.

 

[Mystere]

So whys it taking up so much space? My point is I had Vista for almost a year and I never was close to running out of space on my OS partition yet ive had 7 for a few weeks, its ridiculous.

Sounds like you did an upgrade over Vista. If that's the case, there's a lot of leftover stuff left behind just in case the upgrade didn't upgrade everything.

Look in the root of your system drive, are there files that look strange, with tilde's in the name? (~) then those files are probably taking up several gigabytes of space.

You can run the Windows cleaup wizard, and set it to advanced and then clean up these files.

Also, if you do some investigation, you'll likely find that there are two folders using a large amount of disk space. Those folders are winsxs and installers. The installers folder keeps backup copies of your installed files, and winsxs is the Windows Side by Side folder, which allows multiple different versions of the same DLL to exist. This solves the old "DLL Hell" problem where two programs want different versions of the same DLL.

Winsxs is also somewhat special, in that in many cases it uses "hard links". These are multiple files that actually link to the same physical file on disk. This means that most programs that count disk space count the same file multiple times, even though it only uses one files worth of space.

On my system, these two folders alone take up 10GB according to various space calculators.

 

[Exodus]

I didnt do an upgrade, I did a clean install.

 

[Muad Dib]

You REALLY need to provide more info and details if you are interested in some targeted help.

Like maybe, how big it the Win7 partition? How much is used? These might be salient data points.

Download and install the free Treesize JAM Software - Windows Freeware

Might give a clue as to what is using up space.

But if you don't want the "hassle" or expense of changing, Vista is a perfectly good OS. Personally, I like it. It is not as good as Win7 IMO, but there will be MANY who don't switch or wait to switch.

I didnt do an upgrade, I did a clean install.

So can you contribute any information?

Can you run Treesize on the Win7 partition and post a screenshot of the results?