installation has used too much memory

[alfie64]

hello everyone,hope you can help,
i ha re-installed windows vista ultimate (official copy),and my pc memory has only about 30 giga left out of 150,and since i have not installed any programs,does anyone know why is this possible?

my pc is running on vista 32 bit.

thank you all in advance

[edDV]

Do you mean hard disk space?

My Vista 32 install (with applications) is about 55GB. Big space hogs beyond that could be system restore files or data (especially MCE video).

[minidv2dvd]

you should re-format the hard drive before installing windows.

[redwudz]

I would redo the install and delete all partitions, then create a single new partition and Vista will reformat the drive and you should end up with less than 30GB used drive space after the Vista install and before you install your programs.

If this is a laptop it might also have a restore partition that is taking up space. If you used a regular Windows install disc, and not the laptop restore discs, you might as well delete it also, as it's probably useless now.

[alfie64]

thanks for your replies,in fact i did install vista without formatting the hard drive, i will re-install everything again,,

thanks

[TBoneit]

If you read the screens carefully when you do a re-install it tells you it is moving the entire existing Vista installation to a backup directory and then installing the Vista in all new install. This is done so that you can recover user data from the previous install. If you are sure there is nothing you need from the old installation you can just delete it to free up the drive space. BTW Memory is RAM, not hard drive space.

[thomasrob248]

Vista's System Restore keeps two types of restore points, one for shadow copies of files used to restore previous versions of a file that you want to recover due to corruption or deleting of files, and the typical restoring of a previoius saved system state. System Restore uses up to 15% of each NTFS drive on the system that is at least 1 GB.

To determine how much disk space System Restore is using, the following command can be used:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

For the above command to run you must use elevated privileges:

1 – Click on the Start menu then click All Programs / Accessories.
2 – Right Click on the Command Prompt option and from the drop down menu click on the Run as Administrator option.
3 – At the command prompt type:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

and press Enter

(NOTE: if the command does not run change directories to c:\windows\system32).

After the vssadmin has executed you will see results similar to the following:

Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 237.419 MB
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 400 MB
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 2.092 GB

The output above shows space used on the C:\ drive by System Restore is 237.419 MB.
The maximum space allocated for System restore is 2.092 GB

To view the number of restore points you currently have on your Computer run the following command

vssadmin list shadows

Next, to reduce the allocated space used by Vista's System Restore, use the following command:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[OnVolumeSpec:] /for=[ForVolumeSpec:] /maxsize=[MaxSizeSpec]

Where:

* OnVolumeSpec: is the drive letter, for examaple C

* ForVolumeSpec: is the drive letter, for example C

* MaxSizeSpec: is the maximum size you want System Restore to use, example 1GB

When decreasing the space allocated to System Restore, you will loose the earlier system restore points. The advantage is gaining extra free space. If you are concerned with losing the previous restore points, wait until you do not need them anymore before reducing the allocated space.

If you plan on upgrading to Windows Vista or running a clean install and will need extra space, consider reducing the space after installation has completed.

It is not recommended to disable System Restore. The capability to restore to a previous point in time or having the new Shadow Copy feature available can be a time saver if something goes wrong or if you delete a file.