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Historically I have had about 18.5 gigs of space left on my hard drive, give or take. Curiously, last week, I noticed that the hard drive space was down to 17.6 gigs and today I have noticed that my hd space is down to 16.9 gigs. I say Holysmokes!

I have run norton antivirus, ad-aware and Spybot and get nothing. My kids have told me that they have installed nothing nor have they added music to the machine. I use System Security Suite 1.04 to clean out my temporary internet files.

HELP!!!!:eek:

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Good catch, — System Restore can quietly consume gigabytes. On Windows XP the feature is allowed to use up to about 12% of a volume by default, so large restore‑point quotas will make free space shrink fast. (learn.microsoft.com)
To reclaim space quickly without losing the ability to roll back, run Disk Cleanup → More Options → System Restore → Clean Up (this removes all but the most recent restore point). (support.microsoft.com)

If you’re wondering how much to keep: a fixed target (for example ~1 GB) is usually fine for a home desktop; it buys several restore points without using an excessive percentage of the drive. Don’t reduce the quota so far that System Restore cannot create points — Windows needs a minimum amount of free space to operate (around 200 MB at install time). If you already use a reliable full‑image backup solution (as noted with Acronis), you can consider reducing or disabling System Restore — but only if you maintain regular images. (edbott.com)

A few practical follow‑ups that were missing from the thread: scan the drive with a visual disk analyzer to find hidden space hogs (WinDirStat or TreeSize make this immediate and obvious), check for a large hibernation file (disable hibernate if you don’t use it to remove C:\hiberfil.sys), empty the Recycle Bin and run Disk Cleanup regularly. Use official download pages (WinDirStat, TreeSize) to avoid bundled adware. These steps will help you both recover space now and stop surprise shrinkage later. (windirstat.net)

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Member Avatar for holysmokes

figured out the issue. the system restore capacity was set to 12% somehow and recent removals of programs created new restore points. I reduced the amount but is 2 gig enough for system restore space or too much??? If anyone knows, please let me know.

Member Avatar for vicec64

Hi. Yes it's enough. Personally i don't even turn it on but i don't recommend that for anyone but a very advanced user plus i use Acronis anyway. I used to go with 3% and it worked out just fine.

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