Where Did All My Disc Space Go?

Oblivion

I've just purchased my first Vista PC, a Dell M1530 laptop with Vista Ultimate installed. It came supplied with a 500GB Samsung hard disc.

I have already loaded onto it my extensive photo collection from my existing Dell XP workstation but only a fraction of the software I have on the old machine. I'm therefore somewhat amazed to find that when I look at the Properties of my laptop hard disc, it says that 130GB are already used compared to just 70GB on the old Dell.

Is this usual for Vista? Does it really take up nearly twice the space of XP, or is there something more sinister going on here? Any advice appreciated.

Dave.

philnicandamy

Vista disc caching?

therealdessie

Do you have a recovery partition on your new machine? A check through your manual will tell you if you do; if there is one it will include the operating system and possibly any other bundled software the machine came with.

Vista itself uses around 4GB, so that won't be all of it. As you have Vista Ultimate too it's possible the machine was configured to carry out a full backup of the disk image.

DatabaseError

My vista folder is 18Gb, my program files add another 40, don't worry

free4440273

Nothing to worry about; hidden partition perhaps; Visa file management issue; no worries with a 500GB drive

Wookey

The actual size and its formatted size are also slightly different, typically allow approx 7% of space to be "lost". Therefore your starting size for the HDD will have been about 460gb, guessing slightly here with regards to vista (i have little experience of it) but this should be viewable thru my computer/disc properties.

free4440273

^That sums it up nicely:)

Conor_3

In addition to that, don't forget that system restore and shadow copy service will take up a fair bit of space too. Depending on the RAM, 2GB could be allocated to the swapfile and whatever memory is in the computer will be allocated an equivalent sized file on the HDD for hibernation.

Oh and don't forget that if it's a Dell with Norton Ghost installed, there'll be a few full and incremental backup files as well.

Oblivion

Thanks for all your responses guys, I feel a bit more comfortable about what I'm seeing now.

Last night I used the Vista Ultimate utility to create a complete Backup & Restore Image of the laptop to one of my external USB drives. The whole image takes up just under 80GB of which 50GB is just my photograph files, so that sort of puts the whole thing into context. I guess the additional space reported as being used is simply down to swap space, automatic daily restore points, hidden recovery directories etc. as has been suggested.

As an aside, I've put off getting Vista until now because of all the bad press I'd read in the past. I think they must have ironed out a lot of the initial issues because I have to say I'm really loving this OS and so far it seems to be rock stable.

Dave.

Conor_3

Service Pack 1 fixed a lot of things. I'm running a BETA of Service Pack 2 and it feels pretty much at XP performance levels.