Is Vista eating to much?

Windows Vista is a great operating system! It is safe secure and easy to use. But there is one thing every one claims about after giving it a fair try, the operating system is growing and becoming bigger and bigger, it is eating lots of Gigabytes from your hard drive.

Computers love to store useless data, those files are store normally for a couple of days after it will be deleted automatically however there can be also some files which rest in an temp. folder for longer time or forever these can be deleted with software made for that reason or a part of those with the Disk Cleanup software built in to Vista.

You can clean up the hole system by starting it from the start menu; easily search for “disk cleanup” or go to the Computer select the drive you want to clean and right click it, select properties and in the window popped up select “Disk Cleanup” next to the diagram of the storage capacity of your drive.

Other reasons why vista is growing are backups, thumbnails, and indexing but that doesn’t mean that you can’t enjoy searching your files and your big hard drive at the same time, with removing those files from the index which you know you won’t need, for example when you install winrar it will index all .rar, .zip, .7z files but also all .r00 .r01 … files but that’s really unnecessary because you can know where the r.01 files is there is also the r.23 file.

To remove unnecessarily indexed file types open up the control panel and search for “index” and select “Indexing Options” “Advanced” and there go to the “Fie Types” tab where you can see a huge list of files extensions you have to unselect all expect of those you knew you will use and want to search from the start menu and from the explorer window.

In the “Indexing Options” window you also can select in which folders you want to have indexing, just click the “Modify” button, click “Show all Locations” and check those folders in which you want to have effective and fast searching.

You can deactivate folder and file previews, this can save you 100 of Megabytes but it shirks the user experience and makes it nearly impossible to find your photos. To do this open up the “Organize” menu in the left top of every explorer window Select “Folder and Search Options” and in the “View” tab check “Always show icons, never thumbnails”

You also can easily determinate the size of your recycle bin by left clicking on its icon selecting properties and under “custom size” type in the maximum size which the deleted files can occupy from your hard disk if you delete more or bigger files as that than they will be deleted forever.

Windows Vista is using a lots of memory, and when it things that the you don’t have enough in your computer it can create also virtual memory on your hard drive to be sure that it won’t use to much of the good open up the Control Panel and go to “ System and Maintenance” and under the green “System” text you have to click on to the “View amount of Ram and Processor speed“ , there in the left sidebar click to “Advanced System Settings” in the performance box click “Settings…” select the “Advanced” tab in the “Virtual Memory” box click the change button, uncheck “automatically manage paging file size for all drivers” and you can custom your Virtual memory size.

Last big thing what’s using your hard drive are shadow copies and backups if you are using Windows Photo Gallery or Windows Live Photo Gallery than you can knew that it is always storing a previous copy of your photos, these can be deleted with the Disk Cleaner but if you don’t want to mess around with it than go in the gallery window to the “File” menu and select “options” in the opened window go under “Original Photos” to the popup menu where you can select one day, one week, one moth… to delete the backup file of your photos.

Finally the biggest space is taken on your hard drive by the shadow copies that’s the same thing like on mac the time machine all saves from old files are stored there, and it can take up to more than ten gigabytes from your disk space on my computer it took 11,xGb from the 80gb driver.

To determinate its volume open up a “Command Prompt” as an Administrator and type in “vssadmin list shadowstorage” to see how much space it takes from your drive to shirk that volume type in “vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=c<your driver>: /on=c<your driver>:: /maxsize=1GB<size to shirk>:”

You can use KB, MB, GB, TB, PB, EB however the minimum size is 300MB.

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