Installed Vista - where's my HDD?

i recently installed the Vista upgrade on my HP dv6000t laptop (within the last week) and i immediately checked to see how much space i had free on my HDD. i have an 80GB HDD and it said i had about 51.6GB of free space. i think it gives me something like 72.3GB of useable space. first of all, Vista takes up THAT much space? heck, that's nearly 30% of my useable space right there. but now, i'll check back once in a while and my "free space" keeps dropping. the only things i've installed of any significance are photoshop (less than 150mb), my digital camera software (around 100mb), and then some instant messaging programs. everything in the "unistall or change a program" thing adds up to less than 600mb. and i'm not storing any media on this thing yet.

anyways, i checked a few days ago and my free space was somewhere around 46GB. right now it's showing 39.6GB. where the heck is it all going? 10+ gigs is a lot for this HDD. i haven't really done anything with my computer since i intalled Vista. i hadn't noticed this problem with my previous OS (XP media center) so i thought maybe Vista had something to do with this. is there anything i can look for that might be causing this?

 

ok i figured it out. it was a result of all the restore points Vista was creating. that alone gave me 10GB more and put me back up over 50GB of free space (out of my 72.3GB of useable space), which about where i was after installed the Vista upgrade.

btw, does anyone reading happen to know how much space Vista takes up? i have the express upgrade and Disk Cleanup shows me as having nearly 8 gigs used up for a previous windows installation. i take it that must remain on my computer since i have the express upgrade version of Vista? either way, i only get around 51 gigs out of my 72.3 it appears. what a hog Vista is apparently. that just doesn't seem right.

 

System Restore perhaps.

 

Vista ultimate takes 15GB+

It really depends on which version you installed.

 

My Vista Business install uses 10GB.

 

well geez. i wonder why i only end up with 52 gigs out of my 73. the restore partition is gone (because i already burned the discs and used them once, which won't re-install the partition). there's only 1GB that is "unallocated." the remaining is the C: partition.

hmmm. i'm still determined to figure this out now that i've found out it's only taking up between 10-15 gigs for you guys. maybe it's because i have the upgrade version. however, i don't see why that should make much of a difference. it's still the same Vista Home Premium.

 

How did you delete the restore points?