32-Bit Vista Utlimate SP2 - Should It Take Up 95GB And Create a Norton Ghost of 65GB?

[Savage1701]

Please pardon my ignorance here. I have 32-bit Vista Ultimate on an older Pentium D system. It's fast enough, and I have a good graphics card. I got the copy as an OEM when I built a different system and never used it. I decided to try it here just for the heck of it.

It is used for 3 things - As a SageTV client (so there are NO video files stored locally on the c: drive), as a Media Portal client (again, NO video files created or stored locally) and UB Funkeys for my son (not a big app by any means).

As far as utilities go, I have a couple - O&O Defrag, Catalyst Control Center, Norton Ghost, and CPUZ. That's about literally it. Nothing else.

I've enabled the ability to see hidden AND system files. The pagefile is on the second drive and there are no leftover ones on the main drive. Hyberfil accounts for maybe 3GB of the total. I did a cleanup and got rid of Windows.old.

Is this a case of supply creating its own demand? In other words, if I installed this on a 30GB SSD, would it only take up 10-15GB or so? I've heard that's what a clean install of Vista Ultimate takes.

Is Ultimate just grabbing a ton of space for restore points and shadows and such because it can?

This just seems ridiculous to me that I have to spend an hour letting my drive Ghost itself if I want a backup. the c: drive is a SATA II 500GB WD drive.

Is this normal? Is something lurking on the c: drive I can't find but is being backed up anyway?

I'd like to get a 60GB SSD but am honestly afraid to when I see this going on.

How would Vista Ultimate install in that case?

Could I go down to 30GB?

Thanks for any help.

 

[kimsland]

I use Norton Ghost, there's not may of us left though as "Acronis True Image" seems to be the rage for now and for many previous years
Actually Acronis can now restore to a different hardware configuration so they are doing quite well

No, your computer should not be 95 Gigabyte ! with the small amount of programs
But Yes, many users are up to that and way more in size, this generally from Windows updates and millions of temp files etc etc etc

Many Users also have 2nd User accounts and data (including data ready to be written to disc) that they are unaware of

I use CCleaner
And TFC
And remove all System Restore points
And also remove all copies of downloaded MS Updates
Unneeded programs removed
And data, and shared files I don't need
And even I'm on 150Gig (but I have a lot of programs installed) Still this is nothing compared to most Users out there

So have you tried Acronis?
Or have you just tried re-installing Windows perfectly clean, and then creating an image?

 

[Savage1701]

Kimsland:

Thank you for the suggestions - I will try them and see what happens.

Yes, that's a clean install of Vista, sadly. Actually, it's the second clean install. A power failure after the first one mangled it. Both were/are huge.

I have Acronis as well, but any computer I use it on seems to lose its network sharing ability no matter how much I increase the registry entry in the lanman server area. ("Not enough server storage space is available...) so I don't use it. I have the second to most recent version of True Image. Maybe I should give TI 2010 a try.

I'm not a Ghost fan per se, and I've seen it do some weird things as well. I am considering O&O for a ghosting program.

I know Acronis can do some special things, especially in the SSD world ( I use quite a few OCZ drives and their forum members like Acronis for preserving alignment on restores), but the shares issue plagues me too much.

I'll see what happens if I try you suggestions and try to see if I can get Vista Ultimate down to a more manageable size.

Thanks again.

 

[Savage1701]

Kimsland:

Thanks - It was system restore. Once disabled, the c: used fell back to a little under 30GB. Still bloated, but at least manageable for backups and such.

CCcleaner only found about 1GB to remove and I did not want to mess with the 8GB of stored Hotfixes, but killing SR is good enough. At least now I can comfortably get the OS onto a (somewhat) affordable 64GB SSD, which was my real goal.

Thanks again.

 

[kimsland]

Thanks for the update