Thinkpads Forum

been using this laptop for a whle, however, i' ve notice my HD will get smaller day by day for no reason. and i can't find the program that's possiblly doing some kind of background work need help thx

Which Operating System?

Anyways try this:

why my available HDD under Vista is decreasing.

Is system restore turned on? Are you using remote desktop a lot?

Also, after you free up space by using the methods recommended by rye engineer, you might be tempted to turn off system restore as it, if left to its own devices, pretty quickly starts eating up a lot of space. However, personally, I have found system restore to be very useful from time to time, and therefore I wouldn't want to completely turn it off and it is not necessary as there is another way to keep it from eating up a big chunk of your hard drive space and still keep system restore working for you.

By default both XP and Vista allocate and use way more hard drive space for system restore points than is necessary for most users. In XP it was easy to resize the amount of space system restore could use by just moving a slider. It is not quite so easy in Vista but it is also possible in Vista to resize the amount of space System Restore can use.

Vista by default is configured to use up to 15% of the hard drive for system restore points, (or shadow copies as they are now called), which is quite a lot of space and way more than necessary for most users.

In Vista you can reset the amount of space allocated to system restore by using the following command string that must be entered from a command prompt (run as an administrator):

Vssadmin resize shadowstorage /For=c: /On=c: MaxSize=XGB

(where X = the amount of space in GB you want to allocate to system restore for shadow copies.)

Using this command, I cut the space system restore can use on my system from the default 15% down to 3 Gb which is probably still more than is necessary by a considerable margin. I'll probably cut it down even further if/when I run low on disk space.

But I do like having at least a couple of restore points available at all times to choose from even though I make regular image back ups of my entire drive. It simply is much easier and quicker to use system restore to solve some problems and system restore involves no data loss. Unless you are constantly making image backups, restoring from one of them would most likely involve at least some data loss.