Hard drives these days seem ridiculously large, and yet I've run out of disk space! So where does 120Gb go on an installation of Vista these days?
Manufacturer losses
- Firstly its not 120Gb. Its actually 120,000,000,000 bytes or 7.3% less. Disk manufacturers conveniently believe users cannot multiply by 1024 and so they round it down for us.
- OS reinstallation partition. No shiny Windows Vista DVD with your laptop? That's because they've saved some money by eating up your drive space. I loose a whopping 5.15Gb of mine to the ServiceV002 partition.
So really I only have 106Gb.
Total loss 14Gb
Windows losses
- So how much memory have you got on your machine? Bigger is better right? Well sort of? As soon as you hibernate that laptop that you need at least the same amount of space to swap the memory out to. Lose another 2Gb
- Page files, event with a 2Gb machine I somehow need a whopping 6.1Gb of swap.
- Finally remember that annoying Disk Cleanup tool from XP, well it's actually useful now. It managed to root out another 4.3Gb of disk space. Mainly from our old friend the temp folder 3Gb, but also from Windows Error reporting, Office cached installation files, and lots of Windows update patch folders.
Total loss 12.4Gb
Stuff I really want
- That leaves me with three parts I should have left. Windows itself, Programs and of course data.
Total 44Gb
So where is the rest?
Now I have to take some of the blame here. I've been trying to get Windows Seven working on a VHD. The VHD was 6Gb and the copy that I took and recycled was another 5Gb. So 11Gb was in the recycle bin.
The one thing I've noticed since Vista is that the world has gone backup crazy. My hardware provider, Lenovo, provide a tool to do it. Windows itself does. Most annoyingly my Anti-Virus does too.
Now I can turn off Windows backup without any annoying nags, but if I try to do the same with OneCare I cannot get a green icon. Fortunately I can tell OneCare to backup to a network drive.
That unfortunately leaves the Lenovo backup. As much as I am a great believer in system images it can't really take up 40Gb can it. Actually yes it can. It took a full backup after I built the machine at about 15Gb, and then a couple of incrementals at 11Gb, mainly due to the VHD.
So what can I do?
Strangely enough I'm going to say goodbye to the Lenovo backup and restore. I have a plan. I have already used the service partition to export myself a couple of DVDs that I can use to the rebuild the system, and should I have to do that I'll have a whole 111Gb drive to write to. Next I am turning off Lenovo Backup for good, and should I ever rebuild my machine again I'll use the options to remove it from the machine install.
Next I am going to rebuild myself a modest partition of 20Gb and install Windows Seven. Partly because I want to try it out, but also because I get to install a clean Windows without any hardware manufacturer enhancements. I'll still have to track down drivers but I'm looking forwards to picking my build again, just as I did on XP.
Finally I am going to save my pennies, I want an SSD and they don't come in big sizes yet (at least without a lot of pennies). When I get that I am going to take an image and slap it on another drive. The image will be neat and clean and have no local backups enabled. Maybe its living on the edge but if I really have a problem that I can't reboot from, I'll have an old hard drive sitting around ready to go.