arthur Posted April 7, 2004 Report Share Posted April 7, 2004 (edited) Extremely simple, I wonder why I've never thought of it before. ->I have Win XP with only a few programs installed, so why does it take up 7 Gig? Program Files is 700 mb, Windows is 1.7 Gigs, others 1 gig. So I went to Start>applications>accessories>system>system restore then clicked settings, then I reduced the maximum disk space it was using to 200mb. Like magic, I now have 1.5 gigs more free space! Now you can use DiskDrake or Qtparted or whatever to donate that space to Linux. I'll try to track down the rest of the missing gigabytes, happy defragging! on a 20 gig hard drive, 1.5 gig is a lot. :P Edited April 7, 2004 by arthur Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arthur Posted April 7, 2004 Author Report Share Posted April 7, 2004 on second thought, turn the bugger off. you don't need it, windows will run perfectly fine without it except for the occasional BSOD, at least if you use windows like I do. I use mostly linux now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
feralertx Posted April 7, 2004 Report Share Posted April 7, 2004 I always turn it off, its a waste of space since its useless anyway ... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
linXbox4you Posted April 7, 2004 Report Share Posted April 7, 2004 You can get lots of extra space out of XP by doing a simple command at a DOS prompt. Just type in this code: format c: /u This is one of the best kept secrets in the Windows community. I did this a while ago and I gained space on a whole hard drive. I would highly reccommend it! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted April 7, 2004 Report Share Posted April 7, 2004 I always turn it off, its a waste of space since its useless anyway ... why is it useless? Seriously. Doesn't it not work? I mean, heck, it worked in ME.....surely it does in XP, no? Now, I was a n00b when I had me and it worked, but it saved the install more than once :lol: . Between PartitionMagic8, NortonGhost, and bkups in general I imagine 'I' don't need this sorta thing (I've had xp for 6 days) but to tell people it's useless and to turn it off without detailed explainations is not a good idea in the least. More please! :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted April 7, 2004 Report Share Posted April 7, 2004 Now you can use DiskDrake or Qtparted or whatever to donate that space to Linux. have you done that yet? :unsure: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
linXbox4you Posted April 7, 2004 Report Share Posted April 7, 2004 I have and it does work. just back up your files in case! :o Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted April 7, 2004 Report Share Posted April 7, 2004 I asked because the few times I altered partitions with diskdrake when I had 2k...2k, win98, or both wouldn't boot and I either ended up doing some fixing, restoring or reinstalling. So I do ALL partitioning in pm8 and boot linux with the ntldr. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arthur Posted April 7, 2004 Author Report Share Posted April 7, 2004 DiskDrake with MDK 10 seems buggy. Use Qtparted or Partition Magic instead. In my experience XP is stable enough to do without System Restore (ME is horrible, stay away from it) unless you play around your system files. Clicking on email attachments should also be avoided, and put firewalls or it will catch a worm in 5 minutes (I know a friend who was lucky, he lasted 10 minutes on cable internet with Kazaa before catching a worm, SoBig.F in his case). If you REALLY think you need it, just ask yourself how much space you're willing to give to it. It's set at 10% of your HDD space by default. 10% is too big for me, since I need only about 2 weeks or less of restore points. Hence the tip to reduce it. If you screw up your partition numbering, there are 2 files you need to edit: lilo.conf or grub.conf and fstab. XP detects any change in HDD size and won't complain too much. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bvc Posted April 7, 2004 Report Share Posted April 7, 2004 thanks. heh, I got a worm about 6 mths ago right after a 2k install b4 I could get sygate installed :lol: ....no email set up.....I did go to wu once though. I was new to cable. Now I know to have sygate on cd ready to go at first boot :lol: BTW, I was using diskdrake in 9.2 at the time of trouble. Haven't even opened it in 10, and won't, touch it anymore. I don't need anything. I just didn't want a n00b to turn off xprestore unknowingly and loose everything unnecessarily. When you have 5-10 os's/distros at one time, that's a lot of menu.lst (not all distros have a grub.conf) and fstabs t have to edit :lol: ......no, I'll stick with pm8 and proper partition numbering, where I don't have to worry about it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cannonfodder Posted April 7, 2004 Report Share Posted April 7, 2004 If disk space is the issue, get another disk! While I recognize this as an anti-M$ rant, I would not recommend anyone just turning off windows because it uses disk space. In your case, you probably are using a large swap which is why its so big. When you reduce the size of the partition, windows has to use a smaller swap. Also, windows does collect alot of undo files and other temp stuff. Plus in cases, it will unzip extract files during system updates and other software installs and then leave them behind.. Right-clicking on C: and going to tools, you can ask it to find all this and remove it. More seriously, as a computer scientist, my opinion of windows is that it is a tool. Just like linux, and other OS's. If it was a piece of junk, I wouldn't have it installed. What I really object too is the philosophy of the company that owns it. In this aspect you could call me a moderate in that I'm still willing to use Windows for my own reasons as well as Linux. Ok, enough of being an old fuddy duddy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arthur Posted April 7, 2004 Author Report Share Posted April 7, 2004 company policy is affecting the performance of that "tool" and I am really against Windows using more resources than it should. Well, if they won't sell a stripped-down version of XP, I'll gladly rip it apart myself. I still plan on keeping Windows around, but not in the terrible state they sold to me. If we just keep getting bigger disks then that'll just encourage them. I edited the topic for some precautions. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michaelsil1 Posted April 21, 2004 Report Share Posted April 21, 2004 Extremely simple, I wonder why I've never thought of it before. ->I have Win XP with only a few programs installed, so why does it take up 7 Gig? Program Files is 700 mb, Windows is 1.7 Gigs, others 1 gig. So I went to Start>applications>accessories>system>system restore then clicked settings, then I reduced the maximum disk space it was using to 200mb. Like magic, I now have 1.5 gigs more free space! Now you can use DiskDrake or Qtparted or whatever to donate that space to Linux. I'll try to track down the rest of the missing gigabytes, happy defragging! on a 20 gig hard drive, 1.5 gig is a lot. :P If you reduce the size of your pagefile you will gain X amount of space. :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paul Posted April 21, 2004 Report Share Posted April 21, 2004 set minimum page filesize to (amount of ram)*1.5 set maximum page filesize to (amount of ram)*1.5 meaning min and max should be the same number. This will reduce HEAPS of disk fragmentation Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
linux_learner Posted April 21, 2004 Report Share Posted April 21, 2004 if you really wanna save space......do what i did. i uninstalled......IE, OE, M$ Office, windows media player, activex, VBSscript, IIS,......the list goes on. yes i did actually still have a working version of XP. just defrag dont work, nor does device manager, MCC, antivirus, but then with VBSscript gone that eliminates the probability of getting most viruses. oh. and dont use NTFS. use fat32. NTFS has some bugs. the NTFS driver can load twice on bootup causing the entire filesystem to be unreadable. fat32 doesnt have this issue. NTFS also does take up more space. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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