Hey cud any1 help me by telling me how 2 reduce my Shadow Storage in Vista? I had bought a laptop with 250 Gb storage and it's only showing 226gb and after installing vista another 20 gb got used up... I had read in a post tat shadow storage uses up memory space so i checked mine and mine was using 5gb and allocated was 6gb with max being 19gb... i want to know if i can reduce this and also tell me why a shadow storage is used? is it necessary for me to allocate 6gb? and cud u tell me if the 24gb missing is a hardware problem or just hidden and i can retrieve it?

Don't now if this helps but when you do a disc clean you get a box saying more options and one of the options is to clean all shadow copies except the last one , that's what i do and it gives me back a lot of hard drive

Having just 1 restore point available is still a bit risky. If it is corrupted, the are "Up the creek without a paddle".
I personally use ERUNT, and keep a backup of the restore points on a different partition to C:

Your 250GB's you bought are quoted in decimal. What you see on the system is in Binary (7% less) - about 18GB's less for your disk. The rest could be restore points that were already written into your shadowstorage plus some other staroge used by components.