When to reduce System Restore’s disk space

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	LANGALIST PLUS When to reduce System Restore’s disk space
	By Fred Langa A reader wonders about Fred’s suggestion to shrink the amount of space that’s normally given to System Restore. The answer depends on the version of Windows you’re running and exactly what your goal is.

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The full text of this column is posted at windowssecrets.com/langalist-plus/when-to-reduce-system-restore-s-disk-space/ (paid content, opens in a new window/tab).

Columnists typically cannot reply to comments here, but do incorporate the best tips into future columns.[/td]

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My comment refers to the final section of this article and is about Soluto which is referenced about the boot process.

I have been a satisfied user of Soluto for a number of years but have now ditched it.

Partly that has been down to its expansion into other areas of my laptop’s operation but the main reason happened in the last month.

My boot process lengthened to over 9 minutes. Soluto told me that 1 item was taking up 333 seconds and another 67. I looked at these and Soluto told me they were to do with Microsoft .Net 3.5 and were dangerous to remove. I found a service running that used .NET 3.5 although my Add/Remove programs told me I only have .NET 4 on my system. I used remove windows components to remove that .NET 3.5 service which wiped out those 2 entries from my boot process bringing it down to under 2 minutes.

In the process I wiped out an irritating niggle that has plagued me for the best part of this year to do with Aero themes – namely that during boot I get a message about a service failing to start and the usual icon for the start button being replaced by the word Start like older versions of windows (I am on 7 Home Premium), and blank for the extreme right hand side of the taskbar that you used to get back to the desktop being replaced by a solid block button and various other visual changes and font changes to error message boxes and program start and end texts. To solve this I had to restart the Themes service every time I boot up – irritating but not in itself a major issue. This no longer occurs.

So what programs have I screwed up by not having .NET 3.5 service running? Just 1 – Soluto. It totally failed to start. So its no longer on my system. A couple other minor things like Right Click Enhancer wanted me to reinstall .NET 3.5 but I barely used those so have ditched those as well.

So frankly my niggest boot problem was Soluto itself it would seem

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I am using Win XP Pro on my laptop with a Western Digital external hard drive (500 GB). I see that System Restore is monitoring the WD HD even tho I don’t necessarily want or need it. However, I get a message that says “You cannot turn off System Restore on this drive without turning it off on all drives.” Guess I’m stuck here with this resource hog unless you have some other suggestion.

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I am using Win XP Pro on my laptop with a Western Digital external hard drive (500 GB). I see that System Restore is monitoring the WD HD even tho I don’t necessarily want or need it. However, I get a message that says “You cannot turn off System Restore on this drive without turning it off on all drives.” Guess I’m stuck here with this resource hog unless you have some other suggestion.

Does the drive have to be active during boot-up? Or any time you aren’t actually writing something to it or pulling something off of it? My USB drives are only attached when I am backing up, syncing, transferring files, or restoring Windows or data. That isn’t very much of the time, and rarely during system boot.

A USB drive which is disconnected in my experience rapidly unlinks its System Restore properties from the main drive. Then I turn off the USB drive’s System Restore because it isn’t worth anything on a drive which is often not attached.

-- rc primak

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Well, I have been reading Fred since the dark ages and remember this column he referenced very well.

I used to do the clean-up he talked about, but somewhere in the XP updates those uninstall folders changed appearance and I lost track of them.
They used to have a bright blue font that jumped off the screen but now they look like the first attachment screenshot.
Darn, looks like I have a bunch taking up space.

My question, however has to do with the second screenshot attachment.
This folder, $hf_mig$, is BIG and full of KB folders.
Is this all the Log files Fred refered to?

Anyway, I guess I’d like some help deciding if I can throw all of this stuff away.

Kinda’ makes me feel dumber…

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Well, I have been reading Fred since the dark ages and remember this column he referenced very well.

I used to do the clean-up he talked about, but somewhere in the XP updates those uninstall folders changed appearance and I lost track of them.
They used to have a bright blue font that jumped off the screen but now they look like the first attachment screenshot.
Darn, looks like I have a bunch taking up space.

My question, however has to do with the second screenshot attachment.
This folder, $hf_mig$, is BIG and full of KB folders.
Is this all the Log files Fred refered to?

Anyway, I guess I’d like some help deciding if I can throw all of this stuff away.

Kinda’ makes me feel dumber…

Yep, as long as the file names are between two $ signs, they can be safely deleted. Your system may be helped by doing so.

-- rc primak

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