Vista SP2 Results in Increased Free Disk Space?

Terry Olaes

Terry Olaes

I Used to be the [H] News Guy
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Nov 27, 2006
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PCWorld reports that some users are getting back big chunks of disk space after installing Vista SP2. They think that it’s because the SP2 install routine automatially removes older system files and restore points via the “compcln.exe” tool but have not received an official explanation from Microsoft yet. Interesting.

Mind you, I'm not talking about a gigabyte here or there; one reader claimed that installing Vista SP2 freed up a massive 40 GB chunk of disk space. Another reader said, "Wow! I didn't notice that til now. I went from about 88GB free to 122GB free. That's a significant change 'under the hood,' isn't it?" And yet another reader gained back 130 GB of hard disk space.
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Terry Olaes said:
They think that it’s because the SP2 install routine automatially removes older system files and restore points via the “compcln.exe” tool
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That'd be my first thought too... Basically akin to running Disk Cleanup. You don't lose anything you don't need.
 
That is too much disk space though. I don't even think a fresh install and all the Windows Update cache pre-SP1 takes up 36-40GB (referring to the article anyway). If you ask me it's just a case of "I just opened up My Computer and saw I had this much space left. It totally had to be SP2."
 
markt435 said:
That is too much disk space though. I don't even think a fresh install and all the Windows Update cache pre-SP1 takes up 36-40GB (referring to the article anyway). If you ask me it's just a case of "I just opened up My Computer and saw I had this much space left. It totally had to be SP2."
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lol That's what I was thinking.
 
Didn't really gain any space here either. Maybe a gig or two, but it was insignificant enough that I didn't take notice.
 
Now is this throughout multiple partitions and HDs or just in the partition than Vista is installed?
I have a 50gb partition set aside for Vista and core programs only.
 
I recently did a fresh install of Vista Business x64 SP2 integrated for a few test here and noticed it only took around 13GB (including restore point and 4GB page file).
 
my install of vista ultimate 64 bit predates service pack 1, and with the installation of service pack two, i got back 41 gigs fo free space.
 
A lot of this "reclaimed" disk space is probably because the system deletes old restore points. If you have not modified your shadow storage (which most of you probably have not), your restore points are taking anywhere from 15-30% of your disk space. You can manually do this by running a disk cleanup, then viewing the More Options tab and press clean up for Restore Points and Shadow Storage.

You can expect this disk space to be reclaimed by Vista unless you adjust your maximum restore point size.

At an elevated command prompt type in ..

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=c: /on=c: /maxsize=10GB

(or whatever else you want it to be instead of 15-30%)

Withing making this adjustment, my disk usage is around 100GB. With this modification it drops it to around 40GB because 15% of a 640GB + hard drive is a lot ....
 
bigdogchris said:
A lot of this "reclaimed" disk space is probably because the system deletes old restore points. If you have not modified your shadow storage (which most of you probably have not), your restore points are taking anywhere from 15-30% of your disk space. You can manually do this by running a disk cleanup, then viewing the More Options tab and press clean up for Restore Points and Shadow Storage.

You can expect this disk space to be reclaimed by Vista unless you adjust your maximum restore point size.

At an elevated command prompt type in ..

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=c: /on=c: /maxsize=10GB

(or whatever else you want it to be instead of 15-30%)

Withing making this adjustment, my disk usage is around 100GB. With this modification it drops it to around 40GB because 15% of a 640GB + hard drive is a lot ....
Click to expand...

i think this is exactly whats going on. i normally reset people's system restore points and generally find 5-15gb of stuff that goes away.
 
bigdogchris said:
A lot of this "reclaimed" disk space is probably because the system deletes old restore points. If you have not modified your shadow storage (which most of you probably have not), your restore points are taking anywhere from 15-30% of your disk space. You can manually do this by running a disk cleanup, then viewing the More Options tab and press clean up for Restore Points and Shadow Storage.

You can expect this disk space to be reclaimed by Vista unless you adjust your maximum restore point size.

At an elevated command prompt type in ..

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=c: /on=c: /maxsize=10GB

(or whatever else you want it to be instead of 15-30%)

Withing making this adjustment, my disk usage is around 100GB. With this modification it drops it to around 40GB because 15% of a 640GB + hard drive is a lot ....
Click to expand...
My first thought also. Restore Points and Shadow Storage take up a lot of space, whenever I clear restore points I get back at least 4GB. I just cleaned mine & got back 18GB.
 
Ugh, hate no edit! I forgot to add that that's after installing SP2 a couple days ago, seems strange that I'd have 18GB in 2-3 days, so now I'm not sure if sp2 deletes the old ones, or maybe it condenses/compresses them.
 
I bet people are gonna be pissed once they finally realize it's deleted their porn...
 
It's probably also wiping out a lot of muck from the WinSxS folder which holds backups of every system file - since they'd all be replaced outright during the installation of the service pack with newer ones, with no real chance of "rolling back" specific ones which would really create massive problems, that would reclaim a nice chunk of drive space itself, probably 10-30GB on some machines...
 
mynamehere said:
My first thought also. Restore Points and Shadow Storage take up a lot of space, whenever I clear restore points I get back at least 4GB. I just cleaned mine & got back 18GB.
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Gotta love shadow storage though. That's saved me on several occasions after clicking "save" instead of "save as".

If I'm not mistaken, I believe Vista will delete shadow copies and restore points if you ever get to the point that you need the extra space?
 
HOCP4ME said:
Gotta love shadow storage though. That's saved me on several occasions after clicking "save" instead of "save as".

If I'm not mistaken, I believe Vista will delete shadow copies and restore points if you ever get to the point that you need the extra space?
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That's correct.

Vista really is in un-managed OS (Windows 7 too). Leave it the heck alone and you'll have less problems.

Back in the 'day people had xxxx happen to their systems and tweak yyyy was to fix it.
In Vista/7, tweak yyyy causes problem xxxx.
 
bigdogchris said:
A lot of this "reclaimed" disk space is probably because the system deletes old restore points. If you have not modified your shadow storage (which most of you probably have not), your restore points are taking anywhere from 15-30% of your disk space. You can manually do this by running a disk cleanup, then viewing the More Options tab and press clean up for Restore Points and Shadow Storage.

You can expect this disk space to be reclaimed by Vista unless you adjust your maximum restore point size.

At an elevated command prompt type in ..

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=c: /on=c: /maxsize=10GB

(or whatever else you want it to be instead of 15-30%)

Withing making this adjustment, my disk usage is around 100GB. With this modification it drops it to around 40GB because 15% of a 640GB + hard drive is a lot ....
Click to expand...

went from 230 > 294GB Thanks :p
 
MS should take a page from Apple's book and create a short ad campaign about how updating windows vista clears up space and Mac OSX doesn't do anything but take up more space. This is something they could use. Heh, what do you guys think?
 
XamediX said:
MS should take a page from Apple's book and create a short ad campaign about how updating windows vista clears up space and Mac OSX doesn't do anything but take up more space. This is something they could use. Heh, what do you guys think?
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Or hell, they could outright lie like Apple does and say that Windows uses less space DAILY and OS X doubles in size every year.
 
FreeRadical said:
winsxs magic :p
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My first thought. I have a 40gig OS partition on my Vista x64 workstation and 12.4gigs is taken up by winsxs. I've disabled shadow copies, deleted temp files, etc and still only have 1gig free. I'm installing SP2 now, will update after it's done.
 
I installed SP2 but didn't keep track of the difference in disk space.

I just installed vista sp2 (and ubuntu 9.04) on an asus 1000HE (atom N280 w/ 2 GB). It's quite usable - performance is at least up to my expectations. Aero is supported, but after testing some 720p x264 playback I found it's best to leave Aero disabled. I also disabled a couple services that tend to hammer on the HDD such as Windows Search and Superfetch.

As for Win7, I'd run it now except it hasn't been released yet and I don't run any beta/RC OS (except in VM) as a general rule. I don't think Win7 will be so insanely better than Vista as some are making it out to be, especially in performance. Win7 should have been a service pack for Vista, but MS decided that since Vista is a "failed brand", they may as well collect some more $$ for fresh new Win7 licenses.
 
XamediX said:
MS should take a page from Apple's book and create a short ad campaign about how updating windows vista clears up space and Mac OSX doesn't do anything but take up more space. This is something they could use. Heh, what do you guys think?
Click to expand...

Most people towards whom those ads are targeted don't even understand the difference between RAM and HD space... You don't wanna go there, heh.

prof_HATE said:
I also disabled a couple services that tend to hammer on the HDD such as Windows Search and Superfetch.

As for Win7, I'd run it now except it hasn't been released yet and I don't run any beta/RC OS (except in VM) as a general rule. I don't think Win7 will be so insanely better than Vista as some are making it out to be, especially in performance. Win7 should have been a service pack for Vista, but MS decided that since Vista is a "failed brand", they may as well collect some more $$ for fresh new Win7 licenses.
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I've got Windows Search running on my netbook (160GB HDD) and it hasn't bothered me performance-wise... I actually like/use it though.

I agree that Vista was a failed brand and that's why they're coming out w/Windows 7 so soon, but I don't agree that Windows 7 amounts to nothing more than a service pack. While the technical changes aren't as great as those we saw going from XP to Vista, there's still a lot of 'em and a ton of usability improvements that are not typicall standard fare for a SP (which usually don't improve any aspects of the OS unless there was something inherently wrong with them).

It does seem like Win 7 configures itself better on low-end systems than Vista ever did out of the box too... 'Specially as far as RAM usage and such. After all, netbooks didn't even exist when Vista was released.
 
Maybe I'll upgrade on my desktop and see what windirstat says afterwards. I recently ran and tracked down the space hogs and I think there's an Adobe Photoshop directory in there somewhere that stores a lot of old junk. It's no longer there now because I deleted them, and am left with 5GB free of 30 :p
 
Gaining already over 30gb seems unreal. But that's just Vista.
 
Not only did I not lose space, I gained a little instead :p

Here are two screenshots, I apologize for the width. To spice things up, one has been resized using the normal Transform tool in Photoshop and reduced in size. The other has been resized using the new Content-Aware Scale tool in Photoshop CS4.

vistabeforesp2normalres.jpg


windirstataftervistasp2.jpg


Why did I resize them like that? I believe that the new Content-Aware Scale tool in photoshop has the potential to help save the Economy. Too many people are being locked up at the taxpayers expense for simply wanting to resize a photograph while maintaining the original scale of important subjects in the photo. I don't care what the law says, I want to share Content-Aware Scale with the world and so should you.
 
Impulse said:
I've got Windows Search running on my netbook (160GB HDD) and it hasn't bothered me performance-wise... I actually like/use it though.
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I'm not against Windows Search in general - if you use it even occasionally it should pull its weight.

Impulse said:
It does seem like Win 7 configures itself better on low-end systems than Vista ever did out of the box too... 'Specially as far as RAM usage and such. After all, netbooks didn't even exist when Vista was released.
Click to expand...
Vista is running great on this 1000HE so far, but I did have to disable Aero to get the best performance out of it. A lot of users may not think to disable it, and it can make a real difference on lower-end hardware. It would be great if the OS could do a better job of helping the "normal" users out with the right default settings. Otherwise, they're liable to call the OS a POS, when it's really just not set up right for the system it's running on. Anything Win7 can do to configure itself appropriately for the host system would be a big help to regular users.

Superfetch is a good idea, but I've seen it get carried away on systems with lots of memory (>= 8 GB) and try to cache VMware images and ISO images. OTOH on a "low-memory" system (<= 2 GB) it's questionable to enable it. Hopefully Win7 will make Superfetch more configurable. If I could just tell it to ignore certain drives and directories... Or can I?

Win7 will be a smooth OS rollout for MS. Vista in large part (and the win7 public beta program in smaller part) has paved the way for it to be successful. There won't be nearly the headaches with software compatibility and driver availability and quality that plagued Vista in its early days. As much as I think the herd got it wrong with Vista, I'm going to say "moo" and promote Win7. I just won't be in a big rush to upgrade all my systems to it. For that matter, MS needs to offer a better "family pricing" for Win7, so you can license all the systems in a "tech-enabled" house (PCs, HTPC, netbooks) without going broke. I think they offering a deal where you can spend $alot$ and get 3 win7 ultimate licenses or something, it's not quite the right deal for most people to upgrade their existing systems. Of course, if you're morally bankrupt, you can always abuse the MSDN OS subscription program... I'm still hoping they'll come up with a better offer for those who want to upgrade multiple machines to 7.
 
I got about 30 gigs free after install. I'm also on a fairly new install. 115gigs out of 287gigs now. Was around 70-80gigs before install. It deletes something other to restore points.
 
pretty cool... went from 112gb free to 148. now i just limit the shadow copy to 5gb
 
I doubt I gained any free space after the SP2 installation. My OS partition has 12.3 gig free out of 40 gig which is about what it was before SP2. Then again I don't use restore points or shadow copy.

For those wondering about the amount used on the OS partition, I only install programs which absolutely require a reinstall and don't save their program settings in the directory they're installed in on the OS partition. All other programs and all games are installed on a different drive as well as profiles for specific programs like Firefox and Thunderbird.

 
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