Can someone Explain this Please.?

I'm not the technical sort but for months now i have been starring at my 750gig hard drive that has Windows Vista 64 Installed.

So why on earth does it say that i only have about 35 gig left of free space when the programs on don't add up to more than about 90 gig.

So i done a Disk Cleanup and this reports that i can free up space of 465gig [did you read that] 465 gig.

450 Gig of space been taken up by previous windows installs,i have reinstalled Vista twice before in the past 3 years but how can it take up so much space.

Can someone explain please as i am in the dark here and i don't recall this problem when i used windows xp.

I mean how much space does a install of Vista 64 bit actually take up and how the hell can i recover nearly 500 gig of space when i have only installed vista a couple of times in the past,i would have thought Vista would have been no more than about 7 gig so that means i have reinstalled Vista about 50 times [nope]

Edited by time2die (Tue 12-Apr-11 08:38:26)

vista 64 takes up over 25gb of space, recommended hdd size is 40gb

i would advise partitioning the hdd so you can give the OS and its software around 100gb

or just dont install over the top and format, if you partition you can save all data like music, pics, videos and games on another part of the drive that windows will see as a seperate drive from the OS so you can reinstall windows by formatting fully whenever you reinstall windows and it will always use the 100gb partition

BTW windows 7 is much better than vista and takes up less space

Select the folders on your windows disk partition (usually "C:") which you suspect contain excessive data, by holding down the control key and then clicking on each of the folders.

Hover the mouse over one of the selected folders, right click and select properties and the files in all the selected folders (and their subfolders) only will be counted and added up. It might take a while as the subbfolder trees are all scanned and counted.

In this way you can see which folders are storing up the unaccounted for data.


It might pay to see how large the "C:\users" folder is, and go looking for large files there. (assumes C: is Windows disk)

You can also do a search for files over a specified size. Assuming a full size movie video file will be about 4GB start looking for anything over 5GB.

In reply to a post by time2die:

450 Gig of space been taken up by previous windows installs,i have reinstalled Vista twice before in the past 3 years but how can it take up so much space.

It's a while since I've used Vista, but istr that it can create (and keep) some pretty hefty crash dump files which are of little use to man or beast. A clean-up gets rid of them.

I use WinDirStat for that, a useful little tool.

Cheers all for the replies and thanks for the usefull advice and programs to use,i have run disk clean now and i have at least 500 gig more than previous so that helps.

In reply to a post by cheshire_man:

I use WinDirStat for that, a useful little tool.

Is it safe to use and don't use spy ware and other resources that tend to make the PC even slower

So how do you partition the HDD and will i have to do a Vista Reinstall if that's the case.

Google for vista partition managers and follow the guidance of one of the articles you trust.