Vista partition shows little space available

[Harish]

Hi,

I have a Black Macbook 2.16 GHz C2D 2GB RAM. I already had Windows XP on dual boot with OS X. I tried to upgrade from XP to Vista Business 32 bit. But it failed. I tried it the second time and it worked fine. Later I found that my 41GB windows partition had only 4 GB space left. Where am I losing all that hard disk space ?? It can be a real stupid problem but I'll appreciate if anyone could help me, cause this is my first experience with Vista. Thanks in advance.

Harish

 

[Markov]

Windows Vista has a large foot print, but that still wouldn't leave you with only four gigs. Do you have any programs installed? Is so, which ones?

 

[stainlessliquid]

theres no way to know without knowing the amount of space you had left before upgrading

 

[Harish]

I have installed just a few programs till now like firefox and safari cause IE sucks. I just figured out that there is folder called "windows.old" which is taking up around 15 GB. I guess they're files from the XP that I had before installing Vista. I don't know why they are there. Because none of those programs from my XP are showing on my Program Files anymore. Should I go ahead and delete that folder ?? Is it gonna cause nay problems if I delete it. Thanks guys for you replies. I appreciate the effort.

 

[KevinN206]

It's a bit difficult to tell how much space Vista consumed in your particular case without knowing the initial free space before the upgrade. Windows Vista makes a backup of the previous Windows before the upgrade. I think you can uninstall if you want to go back to XP.

Were your programs carried over to Vista?

I think a clean installation is better anyway for any OS.

Vista requires a minimum of 15GB of free space for installation. The actual footprint is usually much smaller. The large size is due to the hibernation file, page file, and system restore.

Hibernation file = size of physical RAM
Page file = usually at least 2GB on most modern systems
System Restore = can be a few GB and depends on how much software installed thus far

 

[Harish]

I ran the disk cleanup last night. It cleaned up nearly 20 GB space. Most of it was consumed by the old XP program files. Vista takes up the rest of the space I guess. Anyways the problem's sorted out now. Thanks a lot guys.