Thinkpads Forum

Hi, gays
I am new to this community, and new to T61 series.
I have problem with free memory on hdd.
My hdd is 250Gb, one particion is recovery (sistem) ~ 7,83GB
Second is ~225GB.

I have installed vista business 32bit came with T61. Other software with windows, page file, hibernate file, …, is ~ 60GB. I try 3-5 tools for viewing hdd occupation.

With simple mathematics I should have ~160GB free space on hdd.
Please tell me where I did wrong.

I read what you write on community site about memory, how to free hdd memory, …, but didn't help.

Thanks in advance

There are a few things to consider:
1. The usable free space on a HD is never the stated one: for instance, I have a 320 GB HD, but I can only use about 298 GB even without installing any OS on it.
2. Vista alone takes up from 10 to 15 GB of HD space depending on the distribution, the architecture (x86 or x64), on what features are turned on and so on.
3. Vista just likes creating backups and shadow copies and restore points all the time (due user activity like installing programs, changing folder settings etc).
4. Folder previews, thumbnails, prefetch, temporary files can also take up certain amount of disk space.

Based on this, I can recommend you following things, but they come at price:
1. Get rid of the hyb file since rebooting and resuming from sleep are almost identically fast (at least for me) for Vista -> price: you won´t be able to hibernate.
2. Tame Vista recovery function by resizing the disk space dedicated for backups, shadow copies etc. Most of the "missing" 60 GB you see are probably occupied by these.
3. Use Vista disk cleanup utility to clean up things you don´t really need. BTW, you can use it for (1). If the temporary files are taking up a lot of space (like 1 GB or more), I recommend wiping them too, otherwise not, but that´s really rather a matter of personal preference. I also keep the thumbnails because they make Vista look somewhat beautiful . Under Disk Cleanup you will also find other options to free disk space.

I don´t know what you have read here, but this should help. If not, then you probably have a lot of programs installed

Cheers

Marin