XP Pro Hard Drive Space Problem...

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BrackMontgomery

Weaksauce
Joined
Jul 10, 2004
Messages
91
Alright, I've been stuck installing XP Pro on a computer with a 2.5G hard drive. I know, this is extremely small, but to make a long story short there's no way around this, as the computer's owner wants XP but will not buy a new hard drive...

So, after the XP install, it says that 1.8G is being used when right clicking on the C drive and looking at properties, but when I manually check the C drive's contents it only adds up to 800MB being used! My question is, what is this 1GB of phantom storage being used on? I need to make this install as small as possible to fit programs on the drive, so it's pretty important...

Any help would be greatly appreciated guys...
 
Check the page file size, check the recycle bin size, check the System Restore size. I think that you'll be surprised to find how much room is being taken up there. My money is on the pagefile but check the rest to be sure.

Cheers.
 
Is there any way to tone down the size of these files, and if so, will it adversely affect the system? I looked at the system tool and it says roughly 700MB is being used for the page file, and I dount I need that...
 
I haven't actually done it in XP yet, but you can set the pagefile to be a specific size, no larger and no smaller (keeps your hdd from becoming fragmented as fast).

right click My Computer and select properties.
goto the advanced tab
click on the settings button i nthe Performace section
select the advanced tab
click change under the Virtual Memory section
choose custom size and set your custom size to however big or small you want it. If you make them both the same then the file won't change in size. You can also tell it to not use a paging file but unless you've got massive amounts of ram in the system I wouldn't recommend it. You hsould be able to find assorted references on Google that will help you calculate the ideal size for the page file.
 
You could also use ntfs compression layer. Right click the files, properties, advanced button, check Compress contents to save disk space in the Compress or Encrypt attributes box.

The 2.5gb drive is probably PIO mode not UDMA, it's already adversely affected.
 
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