Hi all new to forum,

I just recently purchased a sony vaio laptop. First thing i did was uninstalled all of the bloatware, I am still confused as to why my hard drive is so over crowded. I barely installed any programs: aim, anti virus, etc. I have a 250gig hd and it shows that 59gigs have already been taken up. I have no clue where all these gigs are at.

I did a little adding up it and still doesn't make any sense,

program files - 4gigs
windows - approx 20gigs

and that is bretty much where the big volume of gigs are at, i even showed hidden files to see if maybe there where big files hidden somewhere in the harddrive but no luck. Please help i have 35gb of space hidden somewhere. I have a laptop can't afford to give up hd space.

FYI - everytime i i do a defrag on my computer i seem to lose space rather then free them up. I have done 2 defrags already the first time i lost 5gigs and the last time i lost 3gigs. Whats going on?

sony vaio laptop
2.0 intel centrino duo proccessor
250gb hardrive
4gig ram
windows vista 64bit

did, just that only gained 4.5mb i need 35gigs!!! Somethings gotta be taking up that much space, i just cant find out why. Also note that i did not do a clean install of vista, this is out of the box windows but i uninstalled all of the bloatware

Did check your hard drive for errors
here this is how you can do that
You can help solve some computer problems and improve the performance of your computer by making sure that your hard disk has no errors.

1. Open Computer by clicking the Start button , and then clicking Computer.

2. Right-click the hard disk drive that you want to check, and then click Properties.

3. Click the Tools tab, and then, under Error-checking, click Check Now. If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.

To automatically repair problems with files and folders that the scan detects, select Automatically fix file system errors. Otherwise, the disk check will simply report problems but not fix them.

To perform a thorough disk check, select Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors. This scan attempts to find and repair physical errors on the hard disk itself, and it can take much longer to complete.

To check for both file errors and physical errors, select both Automatically fix file system errors and Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors.

4. Click Start.

Depending upon the size of your hard disk, this may take several minutes. For best results, don't use your computer for any other tasks while it's checking for errors.

NoteIf you select Automatically fix file system errors for a disk that is in use (for example, the partition that contains Windows), you'll be prompted to reschedule the disk check for the next time you restart your computer.

I hate that when computer company do that it all useless software. I just wish they would just install the o/s and leave it at that.
Do you have access to a windows vista 64bit dvd disc. then for the key use the one that is on the bottom of your new notebook computer. That way you can do a clean install that what I would do. or it could be the shadow storage-copy within Vista is taking up a lot of space if you do change the shadow storage I would set it to 3gb and winodws vista should be happy with it.
hope this helps.

Also, I assume that your laptop came with no software. If that is the case, odds are it came with instructions on how to make some restore disks with CD's or DVD's in the event you need to restore your laptop to a like new condition. Those files can take up a pretty good amount of space (my wife's took two DVD's, nearly 14GB in all). I am not sure if Sony removes those files once the recovery disks are made.

There is an older program called WinDirStat that gives you a graphical representation of file sizes that may give you some assistance in tracking down some of your larger files.

By selecting a rectangle, it will show you all the info on the file, its size (bigger rectangles are bigger files) location, etc.

http://picasaweb.google.com/lh.....directlink

i did the check harddrive for errors acouple of days into getting the computer. So i'm pretty sure its not that. I went to command prompt and did what you told whs, my 3 numbers are:

used shadow copy storage space: 33.922 gb
allocate shadow copy storage space: 35.907 gb
maximum shadow copy storage space: 33.417 gb

does this mean it is reserving somewhere around 30gb of space for the shadowing? Can i disable that and gain more space on the hd or should i not even bother with it? Thanks

My opinion is that you can never have enough shadowstorage. Sometimes you only discover a couple of weeks later that you caught a problem and being able to reset to a shadow is comforting. Depending on the amount of downloads or updates, a minimum per week should be 10 to 20GB. I keep 30GB, but I also do weekly imaging with Norton Ghost - so for me it is only for the in between Ghost images. You have 34Gb allocated right now (btw: your maximum number is wrong - you must have made a typo. max cannot be less than allocated). And if you watched my tutorial video, you will understand that the shadows are also useful for recovering files.
There are ways to reduce the shadowstorage, but I would not recommend that until you really run into space problems - and you are far from that. So I think you found the missing GBs. Can we consider that problem solved?

http://www.downloadsquad.com/2.....m-restore/

BIG THANKS!!! Doing the hard disk error check i got 5 gigs back, and setting my shadow space to 15gigs instead of 30, this thread got me back 20gigs of precious space on my laptop. Owe you guys big, THANKS AGAIN!!!

Jim, one last piece of advice. Get yourself an imaging program for backup. Read this thread for details.