Vista updating itself almost every day, updates take a big ammount of HDD space!

[Moonfrost]

Hi, I just installed Vista x64 for the first time (first time I use a 64bit Windows OS, I have used Ultimate 32bit before back in 2007) and realized updates are being installed almost EVERY day, the disc I have is already updated with Service Pack 1 so I don't understand why there are so many updates being installed all the time...

Anyway, that's not the issue, the issue seems to be I'm losing around 5-10gb of hard drive space every 2 days or so, seems vista updates are HUGE, when I installed the first time (I have a 500gb drive, in reality it's 465gb) I had 451gb free...fair enough, then after some updates the next day I had 440gb! where did the 11gb go? I mean 11gb in updates? THAT'S CRAZY!

Then a day later I had around 425gb! without me putting all my music, games, pictures etc etc!!, after I installed 2 games I had around 409gb which is fair considering they are big games, then I put my pictures in which is not that much, around 1gb or so...

And now, a day later without having any extra files myself I already have 398gb free!!, does Vista install something all the time that takes that much space? I know the OS after updates and such it's supposed to take approximately 15gb or so...so I should have (providing I had not installed my things yet) around 450gb or so...

I would just like to know if this is normal and if it's going to keep going that way, why are updates so big, I mean it's not like EVERY update is critical and even critical updates aren't that big on ANY other OS I have used...

 

[greeneggsandham]

Sounds excessive to me? my vits64 ultimate with installed programs takes up around 28 gig. All my pics & music are on a 2nd hard drive.
Alot of modern games eat alot of space up on your hard drive. You could try ccleaner which remove any junk files off your computer like internet cache files e.t.c. It's a free programe you can get it frim here CCleaner - Download. Then try a disc defrag, but don't use vista's built in one, it's slow & never defrags files under 64mb. Auslogics Disk Defrag is another free programe that will do i much better job than vista's own, you can download it here. Disk Defrag - Reclaim the Speed Of Your Disks

 

[Moonfrost]

Yeah, but I haven't installed any more games, on XP I had around 15 games, many of them modern and also quite a few older games that don't take more than say 1 or 2gb, then I had around 8gb of music which is not much considering I buy most of my music physically, around 1gb of pictures and such and a few other things...I had like 390gb free.

I only have 2 of my games right now which are more or less 10-11gb together, plus the 1gb of my pictures, no music yet and I'm down to 382.65gb...I had 385 then I was looking at my hard drive info widget on the sidebar and I saw 2gb disappear out of nowhere! and then I installed Nvidia NTUNE and almost a gig disappeared, I know for sure that program doesn't take more than around 100MB...anyways, I will try the defrag software you said so thanks for your reply.

 

[MilesAhead]

@ Moonfrost, it's your computer. You can turn automatic updates off. I'm not a believer in just group updating whatever fix gets thrown at me anyway. If you change a bunch of stuff at once, and it breaks, then you have all the permutations to sort through to figure out what broke it. Look through the updates and only put on stuff you think is useful. I usually google around and make sure I don't see a lot of "Update kbxxxx broke my PC" before I put one on. If the machine comes with the OS preinstalled I've had good luck basically running the SP that's on it. My first Vista machine won't take SP 1 no matter what. So I updated a few things that seemed to actually help stuff, and forgot the rest.

 

[Moonfrost]

I turned off automatic updates since I installed first, I also tried greeneggsandham's suggestion to defrag the hard drive with Disk Defrag and for some reason (and also ccleaner which helped a little) now I'm down to 376gb!!! I mean, all this time I haven't seen any background stuff or anything (no hard drive activity and very low CPU usage) so I don't think it's updates...I don't know but I think I will run out of space soon which has never happened to me even when I used this computer's original 200gb hard drive, it's crazy!

 

[SIW2]

Hi Moonfrost,

A System Restore point will be created before each batch of M$ updates is installed. That may be using up a lot of space.

I often suggest people reduce the max. allowed shadow copy storage.

There is a tutorial here:

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/76227-system-restore-disk-space.html

Hope it helps

 

[dinesh]

Seems to be a virus problem

 

[MilesAhead]

It could be some malicious software I suppose. I did see some reports awhile back about the HD getting bad sectors because the heat from the power supply was venting right onto it. But that was characterized by lots of read retries and you say you don't have unusual disk activity or slow system so I'd tend to guess somebody is filling up your drive on you.

 

[greeneggsandham]

If you have only just set your system up & can't find a solution, you could always consider a fresh install with a format. Try to rule out any hardware issues 1st with some kind of Hard Drive Diagnostics software, google it. Give microsofts malicious software tool a go online & maybe give spybot a bash. See if they can detect anything hidden in your system somewhere.

 

[MilesAhead]

Yeah, you might want to go to Malwarebytes.org
download update and scan and see what you get.

I had a registry hack on my Vista64 where I couldn't delete files or folders.
Malwarebytes quick scan picked it right off.