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I just uninstalled a bunch of programs (about 20) that I didn't need, partially because I didn't need them, but also to free up a bit of space.
The odd thing is, after I uninstalled all of the programs my free space actually decreased! First it decreased by about .5GB. Now I check back about 5 minutes later (during which I made no changes) and .2 more GB are now gone. Any clue whats going on?
I'm not that pressed for disk space but I was just curious as to why this happened. It seems counterintuitive for free space to decrease as you delete stuff.
Edit: I just checked back again (since I began typing this) and it has again dropped by .2GB...
Hey, actually I just figured it out (I think).
Surprisingly it wasn't downloads or security updates (Microsoft has been pummeling me with them lately.)
What I hypothesize was happening was that, because I deleted and removed so many programs, Vista was creating restore points in case I needed to restore my system to pre-program-removal state. Every time I removed a program the disk space occupied by the Vista ShadowStorage grew. I went in and manually reduced the size of the ShadowStorage disk space to a more reasonable size and it freed up ~10GB...
Now again, thats just my theory of what happened...we shall see.
Thanks again for the very quick responses, though.
I will keep them in mind just in case my theory is proven wrong and the disk space starts to shrink again.
Sometimes when you get REALLY low, freeing space will allow the swap file to grow, taking back the space you freed by deleting stuff. How much free space did you have before and immediately after uninstalling the programs? You might also want to run the disk cleanup wizard to delete temp files which can accumulate and consume a lot of space. I also like to manually configure the recycle bin to set aside less space than the default.
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