Is Windows Vista Eating Up All Your Gigabytes?
section: windows, for your questions: KezNews forum, 3.1.2008
Now, Windows Vista is an indisputable resource hog. There is no other way of putting it. Vista will go through CPU cycles with no problems and will swallow system memory like there's no tomorrow.
At the same time, the hard drive is also an important part of the hardware puzzle necessary to run Vista smoothly. The Home Basic edition of the operating system requires at least a 20 GB hard drive to install and run, while the Home Premium, Business, Enterprise and Ultimate SKUs cannot do without at least 40 GB. But, all the editions also require a minimum of 15 GB of available space. This because Vista will eat up all you gigabytes.
Go ahead and do a little test for me. Select all the items on the partition where Vista is installed, then right-click one of them and choose properties from the contextual menu that will appear. Now, do the same but for the entire partition. Just take a look at the numbers for disk space. The image included toward the bottom of this article contains the values I got on my machine. According to Windows Explorer, Local Disk (C:) has 13.1 GB of free space of 34.1GB. Sweet! But at the same time, all the items on the partition amount to just Size: 16.0 GB (17,257,535,591 bytes) and Size on disk: 16.2 GB (17,453,596,672 bytes). Hmm... And the properties dialog box reveal that I have 21 GB in used space and 13.1 GB still free for the taking, statistics that coincide with the one provided by Windows Explorer. That's no less than 6 GB of disk space that is occupied by... what?
Don't even try to go hunting for the missing hard disk space. The discrepancy is evident, but you won't be able to correlate it with actual files on the Vista install partition. Fortunately enough, the answer is provided over at Running with Code. "Looks like I've discovered the reason for the space usage - System Restore. Ugh. Hard to believe I've had this installation of Windows active for about, what, not even a week? And System Restore has managed to take up more space than the files I've installed. The good news is, with it set at 15%, I'll probably only get another 7gb taken. Still.... It's just incredible to me that it's filled so fast", reads a fragment of a blog post from Running with Code.
Here is Microsoft's official explanation of Volume Shadow Copy: "Windows Vista includes another useful innovation to help you protect your data: Volume Shadow Copy. Volume Shadow Copy automatically creates point-in-time copies of files as you work, so you can quickly and easily retrieve versions of a document you may have accidentally deleted."
source:
news.softpedia.com
Send link 2 friend | Permalink
MORE RELATED ARTICLES:
Windows Vista SP1 vs. Windows Vista RTM vs. Windows XP SP2 || Windows XP SP3 Twice as Fast as Windows Vista – Leaves Vista SP1 in the Dust || Windows Vista Wow! Forget about Vista SP1, XP SP3 and Windows 7! || Microsoft Makes Its Own: 32-bit Windows Vista vs. 64-bit Windows Vista || Vista SP1 RC1 Flies Past Vista RTM and Windows XP SP2
Comments(17)
vista is a bigtime loser!!!!
the reason why some people think vista is cool is the interface.
to me a good os is
the one with
less coding,
less files,
hardware compartible,
very
fast,
user freindly,
less resource demanding
and very secure.
imagine xp with vista interface and dx 10 with inbuilt antivirus plus media center
intergrated with quad core supported softwares(am dreaming)
thats what i pray
someone somewhere will come out with and knock out microsoft meaningless "wow" business.
"to me a good os is the one with
less coding,
less files,
hardware
compartible,
very fast,
user freindly,
less resource demanding
and
very secure."
the ones who do that i will send my dollars cheerfully.
i want a car that runs 500 miles to the gallon, can go 200+ mph, has all the gadgets, is
so secure that you can run in to a concrete wall doing 60 and there's only a scratch on
the bumper....
duh!!!!
you can't have it all peepz. some people
want a nice interface, others want a fast machine at no cost and 386 compatible. current
linux distro's have all you ask for, including hardware support. current hardware might
not be supported by the os, but the same goes for vista, the hardware is not (by default)
supported by the os (microsoft) but by the vendor. this vendor will build a driver that
can be used to make the hardware work in vista. so hardware compatibility is not always an
os issue.
less coding results in worse code. you probably mean "less code",
but to make less code you need to do more coding so you can strip the bloatware and
debugging routines. less code almost always results in a faster program (no bug checking
code) and probably more resource friendly. all in all, four argumants that are actually
the same. the list is getting shorter :p
less code but more/better hardware
support can not be done.
userfriendly is a matter of perception. for a lot of
routines i use a cli (cmd.exe in most of the cases) because it is more userfriendly, to
me. i can get a better result in less time. but i know what i do. to me the lights-out
version of windows 2008 can not be released too soon. but to others a mouse and a
clickable interface is a must to even logon to a computer... please define userfriendly.
(no gui means less code, more resource friendly and therefore will more likely fast)
just use vlite to get rid of this...
when has a new operating system ever been less resource and hardware demanding than its
predecessor?
anyone demanding this is an idiot.
i have 100 gb on c:
and ~400 od d:
lawl, you're the retard. using more and more resources and hardware is just a sign a
sloppy programming. linux doesn't demand this with each new version. it gets better
instead. you can still run the same version on an old 386 as you can on a newer
muilti-core system..... you shouldn't have to buy a new car every time they pave the
road.
"you shouldn't have to buy a new car every time they pave the road"
that
has to be one of the worst analogies in the history of mankind.
i'd expect you to say that since you are, after all, a retard.
see title.
its possible to have an os with less files and faster.
for most programmers
they know its possible.ms is just stupid
if i write a programe with vb and
manage to write the same programe with assembler language, which of them will be faster
and less files?
more than anything else i feel sorry for you....
i dunno what ur problems r guys ... i run vista on a 10gig partition .. flawless. of
which vista itself uses barely 4gigs (sadly the winsxs folder holds around 3gigs of that)
im still working on what more can be deleted to free up more space.
if you dont like
vista, dont use it, or -as i do- modify it till it works like u want it to.
i have ran vista for the last year and i can atest to the fact that it is a resource hog
when compared to xp. vista offers very little over xp other than a flashy interface. i
just switched back to xp pro and have never been happier. vista is not missed. my wow
experiance is seeing how much better xp runs than vista. i now see that xp is certainly
under appreciated. vista runs like a hog trapped in a mudhole by comparison. and no, i
do not have a slow pc. dual 3.4 ghz (single core) 2 mb l2 cache xeons, 4 gigs of ddr2
ram, 500 mb video card.
just like to say mark my words windows (whatever version) will be finished very very
soon. just one word to finsih it ubuntu....
i get so sick of people bashing vista all the time....don't use it if you don't like
it!! its that easy...everyones so worried about backwards compatibility, but you demand
more security, you can't have both, i myself have a athlon 64 3400 o\cd to 2.6ghz and 2
gigs....and it runs vista like a champ. i always have a gig free and my pc never bogs
down....besides xp run like shit and was plagued with issues till sp2 was released....so
stop whining about everything and figure out have to make your shit run better
No new comments are allowed for this article.
For your questions use our KezNews Forum
Vista
By Gar on 04.01.2008 - 01:01