Dan Crevier's Blog : Vista

Disappearing disk space on Vista

dancre — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 07:01:45 GMT

The hard drive space on my Vista machine recently dropped to almost nothing, and I was really confused what was going on. I used my favorite disk space visualizer (WinDirStat). However, I couldn’t figure it out. Finally, I found that the following steps cleared it up:

1. Run Disk Cleanup (search from Start menu)

2. Choose “Files from all users on this computer”

3. When it’s done scanning (which can take forever), select the More Options tab

4. Select Cleanup under System Restore and Shadow Copies

This freed over 40 GB for me! I think that what happened is that the Zune software touched all of my media, which created shadow copies of each file, using a bunch of space. Shadow copy space must not show up for utilities like WinDirStat.

There’s a useful article on My Digital Life on how to limit how much space will be used. My was set to unbounded space.

mstsc /console is now /admin in Vista SP1

dancre — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 05:37:10 GMT

I find it kind of annoying that Vista SP1 switches the /console switch to /admin. I don't understand why they had to break this and couldn't keep the old switch working. There's a bit more info at:

Nick MacKechnie : MSTSC /console switch in Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1

Getting machine to go to sleep under Vista

dancre — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 08:34:59 GMT

I was having a strange problem getting my computer to go to sleep under Vista. When my laptop was not plugged in, it would go to sleep fine when I closed the lid. However, when my laptop was plugged in and I losed the lid, it would lock but not go to sleep.

I finally figured out what was going on. In the advanced power options, there's a Multimedia settings->When sharing media section. By default, it was set "Prevent idling to sleep" when plugged in. I think Windows Media Player had media sharing on. I switched the option and now it sleeps fine!