August 2009 Archives

My original post: http://www.jessicalind.org/blog-posts/windowsvistacontinuestosuprise-unboundlimit at jessicalind.org (or the one where the spouse talks her way on to her husband's online diary slash journal slash blog thing)

I have been suffering with my computer lately with my screen going black and then claiming that my drivers are having problems. My husband says this is probably from something called "kernel panic". All I know is that my C:/ drive had started to fill up rapidly. I take lots of pictures so I thought it was my fault but it was starting to get ridiculous. My C:/ drive went from about 100 GB to only having 2 GB left at 287 GB. I tried to figure out what could possibly be wrong. I had a feeling that it had a problem with the System Restore points but I couldn't be sure. So we logged onto my computer's dos prompt and found a startling issue:


I felt like Strong Bad in the virus episode on Homestarrunner.com, "Holy Crap. That's a big number!" What this means for those who have no idea what this is: Vista system restore had filled up my computer with 120 GB of restore points. I had heard on the internet about this problem that Vista should naturally have a 15% of drive limit. My computer had no such limit, thus being unbounded. It could have potentially gone on and on if there was unlimited space. This makes me think of my calculus courses where I could make a word problem about this. I wonder though if I get the award for most storage space used up by the system restore points.

How could this have happened? Thank goodness I have IT knowledge and knew to look for this but this was difficult to figure out what the problem was and it was making my computer crash in kernel panic. 

I want to thank How to Geek for his recommendation for solving this problem at http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/reduce-system-restores-disk-usage-in-vista/

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