VistaJuice

I mentioned long time ago why restore points in Vista take up so much space. Now, after using Vista for quite some time - I realize that I am missing about 15GB of my 120GB hard drive somewhere.

By default Vista allocates 15GB of hard drive space for system restore points. If you like to experiment with new drivers and software like I do - then you should definitely leave that right where it is, but if you just simply use your computer for day-to-day purposes - you can optimize this and have some more HDD space for your other things.

LifeHacker has a very nice writeout about this, and here's what they say:

To recover some of that System Restore disk space, start up Vista's command line as an administrator, and run vssadmin list shadowstorage to see the current allocation. To change it, use:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[drive]: /for=[drive]: /maxsize=[size]

That is, to limit System Restore to 2 gigabytes on the C: drive, use:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /for=C: /maxsize=2GB

Of course, limiting System Restore's drive footprint also limits how far back it can store points, so do so carefully. Here's more on rolling back Windows with System Restore.

Thanks Gina!

Via: LifeHacker