Missing Hard Drive space in Windows Vista

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UPDATE: I Fixed the problem on my computer.

Thanks to Belal’s suggestion down below, I reduced the “missing” gap of HDD space to 6GB, which is both fine and probably just the space required for my most recent restore point.

The upshot, if you’re too lazy to scroll to the comment, is that Vista automatically takes backup copies of your hard drive and system settings, and it doesn’t automatically delete the out-of-date ones. So you might have a giant buildup of useless backup data.

To get rid of it all, go to the Disk Cleanup utility, click the “More Options” tab, and choose the second option—delete the old restore points. Doing that cleared 65GB off my drive. Good luck.

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I installed Vista Ultimate on the rig I made myself for gaming. So far, it’s been running great, it looks sweet, and I like the way it feels.

But for some reason, it seems to have hijacked about 70GB of my hard drive space. At the moment it’s not that big of a deal, because I have a 500gb hard drive on this machine that I’m using exclusively for video games. By the time I fill this monster up, it will probably be time to scrap it and make a new computer anyway.

However, the missing space is about twice as much as the “used” space. So if that grows…that means I max out my HDD at around 150 GB, which is ridiculous.

The weird thing is that Windows itself can’t decide how much space is used. If I select the HDD properties, it tells me I’ve used 114 GB. But if I select everything IN drive C, and click properties, I get the 43GB reading which should be correct (That’s about as much stuff as I’ve installed on the machine).

Here’s a screenshot. Click to biggie-size it.

[Image: hdpsace]

Anyone else having this issue?