How Windows Vista fills your disk

Recently I reinstalled my PC and installed Windows Vista on it. After using it for a month, I noticed that the free disk space was becoming very limited. In explorer the disk property showed me that I used 46GB but when I selected all my folders and retrieved the size, it was only 21GB.

So where did that 25GB go? Aparently it is the system restore utility (which uses shadow copies) that is happily using my free disk space. Especially on a laptop with limited disk space this is not funny. Opposed to Windows XP, Vista doesn't provide a graphical utility to manage the system restore memory settings. Although, there is a way to change these settings.

If you open a command prompt and type vssadmin list shadowstorage, you can see the used space.

To change the settings, you need to use the vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=[disk_drive]: /on=[disk_drive]: /maxsize=[max_size]. The sample below sets these settings on my machine to a maximum of 1GB:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=c: /on=c: /maxsize=1GB

References:

• http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/archive/2006/11/16/identifying-how-much-disk-space-is-used-for-restore-points-in-windows-vista.aspx

"Upgrade patch can not be installed ..." while installing Visual Studio SP1 for Vista

To be able to use Visual Studio 2005 on a Windows Vista machine, you need to install a special service pack: (Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista).

When starting the installation I received the following error:

The upgrade patch cannot be installed by the Windows Installer service because the program to be upgraded may be missing, or the upgrade patch may update a different version of the program. Verify that the program to be upgraded exists on your computer and that you have the correct upgrade patch.

The service pack is searching for specific components that are not available. These components ship with the standard SP1. So before installing the Vista specific service pack, you need to install the standard SP1.

Reporting Services on a Vista machine

Since a while I have reinstalled my test pc to be able to experiment with the new Windows operating system. When trying to install Reporting Services 2005, the setup gave me the following warning:

IIS Feature Requirement ...

It seems that Reporting Services can't find IIS although it is installed on my PC (note Vista has IIS 7).

After googling a while, I found the following article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/920201/en-us. Apparently it is necessary to install specific IIS 7 components in order to be able to install Reporting Services on a Vista machine.