System Mis-reporting Disk Usage
Jul 4, 2008
I am using Windows Vista (32-bit) on my computer. Lately, I have noticed that the reported "used space" on my hard drive (via right-click/properties) keeps rising dramatically while I add very little to my computer. I then made sure that I had turned on options to show system files and hidden OS files so that I could add up the used space. What I found is that all of the files on my computer added together total 44.2 GB, while the usual right-click on the C-drive (selecting Properties) reports that I have used 65.2 GB. I re-checked the math and the folders and still come up with a 21 GB difference - almost 1.5 times the size of what the files/folders add up to.
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Mar 23, 2008
I ran the disk cleanup wizard the other night on my C drive. It scanned my C drive as normal and then came up with results to clean, one of which was for error reporting logs which wasnt ticked by default, but was apparently 99gigs worth! I thought this was pretty interesting seeing as my C drive is only 32gig big, so out of curiosity I ticked the box to cleanup the 99gig of logs, and sat back and watched. Everything seemed fine after it finished, but I rebooted to be sure and then my wallpaper went missing. I went to set the wallpaper back to what it was..... and noticed the file was missing. Then I checked the start menu, all my programs have been removed! (example, powerdvd gone, alcohol 120 gone, winzip etc all gone and nothing working, not just removed from the start menu, but also uninstalled from hdd)
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May 20, 2009
I just build a new computer and installed Vista Home Premium (64 bit). I only have one hard drive (640 GB). I've added a few applications and music and pictures from an external HD. I checked my disk usage last night and it said I had used 195 GB! I got that by right clicking on the C drive and then properties. I noticed I had a Windows.old directory and manually deleted it then emptied my wastebasket. Still no improvement. I tried to do a disk defragment before I went to bed and let it run overnight. It was still running when I woke up so I cancelled it (I don't know how far it was as it doesn't show a progress bar like in XP). I rechecked and now it says I've used 208 GB (more than before).
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Jun 9, 2009
I have Windows Vista Home Premium running on an HP Pavilion laptop computer. I have noticed that my disk space usage doesn't add up, because my total usage always exceeds what I can account for by 20-30GB, even after I have included hidden/system files (or so I believe). However, I recently installed SP2 for Windows Vista Home Premium, and noticed that somehow a large amount of space (around 20GB) on my system disk had been recovered during the installation.
However, over the next few days this space gradually disappeared again, seemingly without giving me anything in return. Can anyone tell me what might be going on here? Better still, is there a way to avoid this disk space usage problem altogether?
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Jul 31, 2008
My problem is when ever i try to launch certain applications it causes an extreme slow down of the system and high cpu usage, after 30+ seconds the system goes back to normal and the program responds fine. Seems to be a bit slow in loading as well. Programs affected include winamp (latest), nero 8, windows media player 11, powerdvd, right clicking on hard drives and opening properties but not accessing the hdd's. Programs which aren't affected include media player classic, open office, ie7, firefox 3, vlc player. I have been messing around with my codecs recently trying to get thumbnail previews of the .avi files on my pc which suceeding in by installing ffdshowx64 so i uninstalled this and the 64bit vista codec pack to no avail. I disabled kaspersky but that was no good either. I also disabled my raid array but that had no effect
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Feb 21, 2009
since a few days my cpu has always cpu load of about 90 % at core 2. Vista is very slow. Taskmanager shows no applications with cpu usage. Now i installed process explorer and i can see that 45% cpu usage (this is 90% of core 2) is for "System / hardware interrupts". Which interrupts are the problem, what can i do to fix this?
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Sep 21, 2009
I have an HP DV7 notebook that I recently added a second SATA 500 GB hard drive in the expansion bay. The purpose of the drive is to serve as a data drive. I also intend to store an image of my system disk on this internal expansion drive so that I can restore my system and apps when I am in the field. For most purposes the drive seems to be functioning normally. However, I recently noticed that, without my instructions, HP Updates were installing suipport files on my expansion disk rather than on my system disk and I have become concerned that Windows Updates may also end up on the expansion drive (so far they appear not to have done this). On further inspection in Computer Management - Disk Managment I discovered that when I put the expansion drive into the 2nd bay, my original system disk was automatically bumped from the Disk 0 position to the Disk 1 position and my expansion disk became the new Disk 0.
In Computer Managment - Disk Management the system currently looks like
Disk 0 - F: Expansion Drive - Healthy, Primary Partition
Disk 1 - C: - Healthy, System, Boot, Page File, Active, Crash Dump,Primary Partition.
If I physically pull out the F: drive from the machine the C: drive returns to the Disk 0 position. I am concerned that my system and application updates are going to get splattered across two drives when I want them to remain on the original C: drive. I can find no way in BIOS or Computer Management - Disk Management to assign the Disk and physically swapping the drives makes the system disk unbootable. Am I at risk of splattering my Window updates across two drives? Should I instruct Vista to regard my system disk C: as Disk 0 and how to I do this?
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Feb 17, 2008
I've persuaded my boss that I need 16 gig of RAM. The purpose being, of course, to make Vista fly. Is a RAM disk the best way to do this? Can I 'cache' the system disk in a RAM disk? Or is there a better way to make use of my new endownment.
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May 9, 2009
I changed the Boot sequence to CD first, then HDD. Everything ran fine and vista seemingly loaded perfectly. After moving some files from my backup drive back onto my main one and installing some drivers, I was asked to restart my computer (for the drivers) so I did. Remembering that the boot sequence was still set on CD first, and since my driver CD was still in the drive, I decided to set the boot sequence back to the way I had it with XP: HDD and then CD. After doing this I quit BIOS and tried to boot, but I kept getting a message saying: DISK BOOT FAILURE. INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER.
So I restarted the computer again, this time with my Vista CD in the drive, and again, the computer wouldn't boot and told me to enter a boot disk. Not knowing what to do, I went back into BIOS and changed the boot sequence back to CD first, then HD. After doing this, and restarting with the Vista CD in the drive, my computer booted up with no problems whatsoever. I tried reinstalling Vista (twice), reformatting the target hard drive, changing the boot sequence around, pretty much everything I could think of......
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Apr 14, 2008
Every time an application crashes I get a dialog that says it's checking with Microsoft for a solution. How do I switch this off ?
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Mar 23, 2008
where I go to report a bug in Vista?
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Feb 17, 2009
My PR&S has ceased to function,it just stopped working,does Anyone know why or did I turn something off that was supposed to stay on?
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Nov 10, 2009
I was told that I should scan the file wklnhst.dat (properties say its a DAT file, 11KB) in order to get rid of it. It was in APPDATA/ROAMING - not in a folder- just on it's own, the last item there. This after having my machine repaired of all kinds of malware. But this particular item was never mentioned by the original person cleaning the machine. Not sure if they saw it.
I scanned with with a-squared, Superanti-Spyware and Malwarebytes (all are updated and I have the real time version of a-squared which is always running. None of them report it as malware/nothing is being detected when I scan it (or scan the whole C drive). Do I really need to remove this? I know dates can be falsified but it says it was created and then accessed on the same date around when I bought it and started using it (the computer). Then it was "updated" this year in June (not by me). If I should remove it but the scanners aren't picking anything up can I just delete it or is that too dangerous?
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Mar 10, 2009
I have a 120 GB hd on my lenovo laptop with windows vista. the SW_Preload says 13.8 GB free of 104 GB. However, when I check the size of each of my folders/files within my C drive, it only adds up to barely 20 GB. I'm wondering what could be causing this discrepency? The folders for example are "users", Windows, Program Files, etc.
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Apr 19, 2008
I just installed and-virus and firewall software but Vista Security Center reports no anti-virus software installed. The anti-virus software reports all is well. Also before installing this I turned off Windows Firewall but still noticed that Vista is reporting Windows Defender running and active. I thought Defender is the firewall. I must be mistaken.
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Aug 17, 2009
I wanted a fast drive, so I bought a solid state drive. But I'm a poor college student and so got the 64GB one, which only has 58GB of space (because Lenovo put something on a separate partition which they say I cannot get rid of). The only thing installed is WinVist and MS Office 2007 (and McAfee and other progrms that came with the PC which weren't taking up much space).
Those two programs took up 30GB of space. Yesterday, some Windows backup thing started to run and said "There isn't enough room on this drive to do the backup, do you want to do it anyway? (I'm paraphrasing)". Since I like having things backed up, I said Yes anyway (and to see what happened). Now I have 1 GB free on my drive. Lenovo won't help me with Windows because that's "a configuration issue" and they don't do that. How do I get rid of this backup and get at least 20GB back? Then, how can I configure Windows and Office to take up less disk space?
It seems like Lenovo sold me a PC with a disk drive that doesn't have enough space to operate correctly. And they won't help me resolve the problem. Also, it seems that it is not as easy to separate your data in WinVista as magazine articles would have you believe. I tried configuring it so my "Documents" was on another external drive, but that proved too difficult.
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Aug 24, 2009
Recently I started getting a black screeen with "Invalid system disk...Replace the disk, and then press any key" error at startup.
What could that mean? And when I just press a key, it starts up normally. Everytime my laptop boots, that error comes up, and I press a random key, and everything runs normally again.?
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Jun 23, 2009
I have a slight problem with my CD/DVD drive. Every so often when I load a disk a get no response from autoplay. When I open My Computer, I find that the drive letter has changed from E to F for no apparent reason. I've gone into the Computer Management file and changed the letter back to E, but the system still won't read the disk. I get the application back in service by running a system restore, but I'm just wondering if anybody knows why this problem pops up. Is it just one of those ghost glitches that float around in Vista? It's not a big deal, but it's annoying.
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Apr 3, 2008
What are the basic differences between XP & Vista? All we do is surf the web, email and download an occasional game. Norton AntiVirus is always on and always up-to-date. My XP machine is dying big time & I can't figure out how to save it. It won't recognize the System Recovery disk that came with the machine, but it will recognize other CDs. That CD must be bent or whatever. The SPs are up to date. I'm running Office XP and it is taking Word and Excel 7 or 8 seconds to load; it used to open in a snap. I installed the latest edition of Firefox and loading web pages with it is taking too long. Most pages should just snap open. I guessed we've been "phished" or whatever because some of the ads I run into know that I live in Seattle. Our network connection is DSL and we haven't made any changes of any consequence that I know of to this machine in ages. I put SpyBot on it a week ago and twice when WinXP started, the Spybot folder opened. Not the program but the folder.
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Apr 27, 2008
I have misplaced my Vista operating system disk, am I able to download a copy of it from Micosoft website. I have the product key, as it is printed on the rear of the CPU.
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May 15, 2010
I just installed a new Hitachi HDD and restored my disc image to it. My original disk had three partitions, the pqservice partition, the active OS partition (C drive) and a data partition (D drive). But I only chose to restore the OS and the data partitions. Now when I view the new disk via disk management, the labeling of the active partition is unusual; there is no volume name listed nor file system, and the free space is shown as 100%. Also, the status shows an EISA configuration. However, under explorer properties for the drive, things look a bit different, with the label and system type correct. What is causing the discrepancy and how to remedy it?I just now also noticed that I no longer have 4gb of ram... I haven't removed anything, but only 2gb are showing in system properties and in the BIOS???
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May 12, 2008
I was wondering why my new Vista system would only hold eight restore points. I recently used up that space very quickly when I instaled a bunch of my old programs that I used in XP. Turns out that my Vista restore points are about TWO GIGS EACH, compared to 200MB beach in my old XP system. By default, Vista appears to allocate a maximum size of 15% of the drive's total space for restore points. Or it might be a fixed number, I'm not sure. On my system disk, it's currently a tad over 16 gigs. That much space would've stored 80 restore points in XP! To change that space allocation requires some command line hoop jumping, rather than just moving a slider in the GUI.
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Apr 13, 2009
When I run the windows disk defraggmentor or an independant third party version, my windows vista home premium computer keeps freezing. How can this be fixed?
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Oct 31, 2009
I have Windows Vista, and I like to make my external usb hard disk stay at D: drive even after I reboot the system.
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Mar 19, 2009
I run vista 32 bit. I'm pretty sure it's Vista personal (PC didn't actually come with a Vista disk). I only use it for music and games,basic stuff. It's a Compaq....It shat itself recently, it wouldn't boot, so i borrowed the Vista Business disk from my dad to repair it/disk boot, and it worked fine, that was a couple days ago. Today it happened again, except it won't repair the same way. I start it up, it goes to the Compaq startup screen with 4 options; [Esc] Boot menu, [F9] Diagnostics, [F10] Setup, [F11] System recovery. Except I can never go to the diagnostics or system recovery menus, i press the keys and nothing happens. Then when i don't press anything it goes to a black screen with "Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter", so i do. Then it says "Windows is loading files" with a white bar below, once that's done it goes to the Microsoft Coporation green load bar that scrolls across over and over. Then it suddenly stops for a few minutes and a blue screen appears saying
"A problem has been detected and Windows has shut down to prevent damage to your computer DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL If this is the first time you've seen this stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again follow these steps: Check to see if any new hardware or software is properly installed. If this is a new installation ask your hardware or software manufacturer for any windows updates you might need. If problems continue disable or remove any newly installed hardware or software. Disable BIOS memory options such as caching or shadowing. If you need to use safe mode to disable or remove coponents, restart your computer, press F8 to select advanced startup options, then select safe mode. (pressing F8 does nothing for me) TECHNICAL INFORMATION *** STOP: 0x000000D1 (0x00000000, 0x00000002, 0x00000000, 0x87995395) *** nvstor.sys - Adress 87995395 base at 87991000, Datestamp 46671a61".....
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Mar 20, 2009
I just got a brand new Vista x64 desktop PC today, and I've been spending all day getting everything installed and properly set up. I just can't decide what to do with the system restore feature though. In the Windows scheduler I've blocked it from running after system startup, settling for a supposed once a day restore point creation.
Unfortunately that's not really how things work in the real world - I feel like I can't do a damn thing without Vista deciding it had better spend yet another ten minutes creating a new restore point. Obviously a lot of that is due to all the day one application installs I've been doing, but even on my previous Vista PC (a laptop), I would usually see several restore point creations every day through what constitutes normal PC use for me...........
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Mar 23, 2008
We have the Microsoft corporate program where you get the products to use through the enterprise. I have been trying to setup a test machine with the 64 bit version of Vista so burned the ISO we created for safge keeping off of one of our network drives. Disc seemingly gets created without issue however when I place it in the DVD drive and choose boot from CD/DVD I get the invalid system disk error just after it says this.
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Jan 30, 2010
I am trying to use a system restore disk for my friend's computer that I downloaded. The computer have Vista, now I have a 32 bit and 64 bit disc. How can I find out which version of Vista I have? I cannot boot into window or safe mode ( I could figure it out from there). I also tried to check the Bios and saw nothing. The laptop only has 2 gigs of RAM I think, so I would assume 32 Bit, but I want to be sure. Also, if I used the wrong one, would it mess up the computer? or could I just redo it with the other CD?
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Apr 28, 2008
I need to create a system startup disk to upgrade my system bios. How do I do this?
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Feb 6, 2010
I'm running Vista Ultimate 64 on a 500 Gig hard drive with 3 partitions.The problem is I marked one of the partitions,not Drive C, as "active" by mistake.I done a Command Prompt to make it "inactive", but when I started the system up again it wouldn't boot.I used the Vista disk for the recovery process, but I got a message "Operating system unknown on (unknown) local disk" i tried fixing the problem with a command prompt "bootrec/fix boot" ,but nothing happened.When I look at the info in Command Prompt it doesn't show the disk partitions, just Disk 0.Also I can't repair because no Disks are listed to be repaired. If I look at the drive in "My Computer" it is full with a file system marked as "Raw" and it wants me to format the drive.I used "Recover My Files" software and it shows some of the documents that are on the drive, but doesn't show any recovery.I looked at some internet post about the message I got and partition and boot problems like I have, but at this point I don't to try any else to make it worse.I would do a reinstall ,but on one of the drives I have some stuff that wasn't backed up.I never thought about backing it up because it wasn't on the C drive.
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Aug 16, 2008
When I run Windows Vista's Disk Cleanup program, I get this list of "Files to delete" window listing showing Downloaded Program Files, Temporary Internet Files, Recycle Bin...and one that is really BIG. It reads "Per user queued Windows Error Repo..." I can't expand the window to read it all. The size is 104GB! (as in Gigabytes). There is also a couple of other files with similar names : per user archived Windows Error Repo...System archived Windows Error Repo..., System queued Windows Error Repo..., My question is can I delete these files safely so I can reclaim some disk space without messing up anything?
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