Classic British Flight Sim

Yes, System Restore files can start to take up a lot of space on the OS partition...Every now and again, I switch off system restore, then restart the computer which now has a lot of space freed off, and finally turn system restore back on. I think this will fix your problem but remember that all your previous restore points are wiped out in the process.

Also, it might help you to fit more RAM...Can't remember if you said how much you have, but XP does use a lot and Vista about twice that much

EDIT...yes I see you have 2GB...that is plenty

Hi guys,

well finally after many hours pulling out hair and teeth trying to fathom out what was wrong with the machine, I decided to bite the bullet and reformat the damn thing this afternoon. And much to my surprise the laptop is now as good as new!

No problems whatsoever. The only downside is the fact is going to take me most of my rest day tommorrow to re-install most of the programs that were originally on there including FSX and GenX. :-(

Oh well I guess its a small price to pay for ensuring that my laptop is free from any further bugs or hardware issues. I guess I'll never know what the true problem was but the machine could have done with a good clean up anyway.

A whole hearted thank you to all the kind words of support and advice. I'm very grateful!


Eddie

Eddie..

I hope you had the wisdom to format it in NTFS too!! ;-)

ATB

DaveB :tab:

Hi Eddie... agree with DB... if you haven't formated using NTFS.... don't load anything else onto it... convert to NTFS asap.

Here is how to do it without reformating. ;-)

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/libr ... 56984.aspx

I thought there was a disadvantage to doing that FAT32 to NTFS conversion rather than reformatting as NTFS.

Was it logical block size on the disk?

Edit:

Cluster size: http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/ntfscvt.php

Since the OS has to keep track of each cluster, I guess that for a large hard disk the reserved space could be full before the disk is if there are lots of smallish files.

And this is interesting -
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Berlind/?p=350

Hi Iain... I'm pretty sure your correct, but you'll find thats how almost all the Manufacturer rebuild CD's do it... they use FAT 32 first, then convert it during the build process. Its different with Vista, and most Win 2k3 Server CD's though. Its just a better option if Eddie has already put data on the disk. ;-)

[edit] By default, fortmating in NTFS will always use a 4k block size.

Hi guys,

tried to follow those instrutions to the letter but it won't allow me to convert. :-(

Can you let us know what error your getting Eddie?

XR219 wrote:Can you let us know what error your getting Eddie?

Hi Ben,

sure thing.



Its asking for the current volume label for the drive. I have no idea what that is.

Eddie..

I think that's just the name for the drive. If you didn't give it one, just hit the go button Can you not convert the disk format within windows itself these days using disk manager (or whatever it's called). Anyway.. best to hold off if you're not sure what you are doing ;-)

ATB

DaveB :tab: