Configure Shadow Copy size for Windows Vista

Wonder why the Windows Vista system taking so much of space in your system drive? Well there are many things which can easily take up your precious space in your hard drive. Windows Vista new features, Vista search and also the backup mechanism so called System Resotre, and Shadow Copies are the main culprit in such issues.

Well we can choose to limit which folder or drive to have the Vista search features so that it minimize the indexing size, and we can also turn off System Restore easily if you don't really play with new drivers or applications everyday. Hence in my opinion it's extremely safe even without the System Restore. Shadow Copies is a very good and cool features which provided by Windows Vista. Imaging one day, you accidentally deletes a file or edited a file which you don't intended to, Shadow Copy can easily restore the files back in just a blink.

However, Shadow Copies actually occupied very large of hard disk space. In my scenario, I have a 40GB hard disk parition for Windows Vista alone, and Windows Vista "intelligently" reserve 15% of my hard disk space for this purpose. In another words, it's whopping 6GB of space.

Right click on my C:\ drive and navigate to properties, proceed to Previous Version tab, you can see that there is a long list of C:\ drive being "Shadow Copied". Initially I thought of deleting the old Shadow which I think I won't be needing it. However I realised that it doesn't not even have an option to do that.

Well... not to say that it donesn't have any option at all. Windows Vista actually do comes with a very good tools to configure the resize the amount of space that reserved Shadow Copy. This tools is called as VSSAdmin. Fire up this tools via command prompt under administrative privileges, and type vssadmin.

VSSAdmin

To see how much space that Windows Vista actually allocated for the Shadow Copies, key in "vssadmin list shadowstorage" in the command prompt.


You can actually resize the amount of space allocated for Shadow Copies via vssadmin too. For example now, I want to resize my shadow copies size to only 3GB instead of 6GB, just key in "vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=C: /on=C: /maxsize=3GB" and immediately the older Shadow Copy will be deleted and release quite an amount of hard disk space.

Shrinked to 3GB

Before shrink



After shrink



Hope that this tips can help you too. :)

Boring weekend

Well it is a boring Saturday, and there is no plans in my mind on what should I do. Wake up at 10am in the morning, finished up few episode of HK drama, and went out for lunch after awhile. After back from lunch, again jump into the boring mode. Looking at my dusty table fan, I decides to give the fan a good bath. See the pictures below and you'll know how dusty it is. :P




And finally it regains it's clean look.


After cleaning the fan, tidy up my bedroom, cleans my toilet, and also my computer mouse, it was already 4pm. Resumes my HK drama, and waiting for my dinner after that. That's it for the whole day. In the end, my housemates and I sat down together and plan for tomorrow, Sunday programme. We decides for a one day trip to Melaka. :P

Goodbye 932B-Plus, and Welcome T220

Yesterday my dad told me that his monitor at home was broke down so without hesitation, I offered my 1year old Samsung 932B Plus to my dad. This morning I went to Lowyat Plaza and my target was 22" Samsung monitor. As I went into the Samsung showroom, Samsung T220 draws my attention to it. The design was nice and it comes with specially designed touch-sensitive power button. However it was in dark rose color, which doesn't gain much of my interest. Just when I plan to gave up, I saw a blue color T220 in the catalogue, so I asked for the salesgirl if they have any blue color unit of T220. Too bad she told that it was out of stock and they have no idea when would it be restocked. Without giving up my hope, I walk around Lowyat and finally saw that Thundermatch in Level4 has few units left. Happily I bought this new baby home. :)

My old 932B+

Unbox my T220 Blue

Stupid.. Why they provide me this kind of power cord.. Where and How am I suppose to plug this? Waste my RM10 to buy a new standard power cord.

Contrast ratio was amazingly high (Although is only dynamic) 20000:1

Touch-sensitve power button. I found it difficult to switch it On when my room are dark as it lacks of physical button.

This is how it normally looks like. (When there is no direct light applied)

It glows when there is a light shine on it.

My new screen and my new wallpaper :)