..Whered my disc space go in installing XP?...

[CheapJabroni]

Hey guys,
I recently formatted my drive and put my XP on a 3 gig partition of my hard drive. However...it seems as if the OS is telling me I only have 2 gigs free...where'd it all GO?? I mean, after installing all my programs on a different partition (which for some reason also put stuff on my OS drive), I now have only 150 megs free on my OS drive. Can someone tell me what's going on and where my gig went and what i can safely delete to save space? I think I'm having major slowdowns because of it..thanks.

 

[AndyHui]

A WinXP install IS quite large.

The main culprits are the swap file (1.5x system RAM, so if you have 512MB of RAM, the swap file will be 768MB); the driver cache, and system restore.

You can turn off system restore or limit the amount of space that it consumes if you want to save space.

I have seen most typical WinXP installations to be around 1.5GB to 2GB in size, if not more.

 

[CheapJabroni]

HOLY...man..ok so i have 512 K or RAM..that might explain it. Where can i turn off system restore?

 

[bsobel]

I'd recommend limiting the system restore size, not disabling it. It is a very usefull feature if you get the machine into a bad state.
Bill

 

[AKA]

Dont forget hibernation.. disable that to free up space.

You can lower your swap file size. Go to control panel, system (i always switch to classic view to find way around) and you can do everything in here. Shortcut combination keys to open system properties is: windows key pause/break

To change swap file go into system properties, advance, performance settings, advance tab then click on change at bottom.
To disable hibernation go into control panel, power settings, hibernate tab.
System Restore has its own tab in system properties also.

 

[CheapJabroni]

hm...ok so i brought down my system restores to miniscule percents and turned off hibernate but i still show the same amout of space on my c:. I'm gonna sound like an idiot, but will turning down the virtual memory effect system performance, and what way? If it slows it down then i'm a little iffy on turning it down. Thanks.

 

[Amused]

1 gig is nothing. When I install XP on my box, and then look at C before installing anything else, I see 2.5 gigs taken up.

I suggest at least a 5 gig partition for XP, but the least I'd go with is 10 gigs.

 

[AKA]

I originally had a 2gb partition for XP.. never a problem. Just set my swap file to be used on another partition.