I installed WinXP on an older computer over the weekend, installed SP1 and pre-SP2 updates, controller chip, graphics adapter, and various drivers plus some utility software. One of the things I noticed was the setting of restore points during the installation process.While looking through the different partitions of the hardrive in the "System Volume Information" folder, I found all the restore points. Looking through the different subfolders on each partition, I found some very large files stored. In my mind, they were wasting valuable disk space. On the other hand, if I needed to restore to a previous point, they weren't necessarily wasting valuable disk space.However, since I am just loading this computer, I decided to see what effect removing the restore points might have on this system. To remove restore points:Press start, right-click "My Computer", select properties, System Restore tab, enable the "Turn off system restore on all drives" checkbox, OK. A warning will appear telling you that turning off system restore will delete all restore points. You get to choose. Note: WinXP Pro - must be in an administrator account to accomplish deleting restore points.In my case, I wanted to delete all the restore points. Opening Windows Explorer, I noticed all the retore points were deleted.Next I went to my main computer running WinXP Pro to see what was stored. Wow, what a bunch of stuff!!! I noticed changes I made to aircraft.cfg files, other files I modified, and of course, restore points for updates and installations I made. The restore points were using up a lot of disk drive space.Hmmm! Should I delete all the restore points and recover the disk space or leave them in case I needed to restore? Since my computer has been running well, I decided to delete the restore points. I turned off the collection of restore points, then turned it back on. Disk space returned.Should you recover disk space by deleting restore points. Well, that is up to you! Somewhere along the line, you probably need to clean up. I guess the decision is whether your computer is running well and you feel you can take the chance.

There's actually a safer procedure:Go to "Disk Cleanup" and after the program computes how much disk space can be retrieved, select the "More Options" tab at the top. You will then see 3 boxes, the bottom of which is "System Restore" and selecting that button will remove "all but the most recent restore point".That way, you'll still have one restore point.

There's a registry key that controls the frequency of automatic restore points and how long restore points are kept. I don't recall the defaults, but they result in a huge number of restore points. I changed mine to something more reasonable. The procedure is at home (I'm at work now) but if anyone is interested I can post it tomorrow.Dan

Hey Dan,I, for one, would be interested in that registry setting. I know that you can set the amount of space System Restore uses in the Control Panel (from 1% to 12%) but I think I'd like the option of controlling the actual amount of restore points better. TIA for the post after you get home. I also use Roxio's program GoBack. I like it better than System Restore because you have the option of 'going back' before you boot the system, which has helped me a few times. Just last week one of our machines wouldn't even boot after installing a game demo (from Microsoft, no less). That machine uses Windows2000, but also has GoBack and we were able to restore it to full functionality by returning to a safe point about an hour before the demo was installed. If you can't boot, system restore is pretty hard to use... we couldn't even get to Safe Mode last week.I use both GoBack and System Restore (at the minimum harddrive amount setting) because of the time I was only using GoBack and the restore file was corrupted (by AVG antivirus program) and then had NO restore points.

Thanks for that tip!

System restore settings are in this key:HKeyLocalMachineSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsNTCurrentVersionSystemRestoreMost of these settings can be more safely changed in Control Panel but there are two that have to be changed in the registry:RPGlobalInterval sets how often (in seconds) a restore point is created. Default is 86,400 seconds (24 hours). I doubled mine to 172,800.RPLifeInterval controls how old (in seconds) a restore point gets before it's deleted. Default is 7,776,000 seconds (90 days). I set mine to 30 days (2,592,000 seconds)Dan

Thanks, Dan. Those settings aren't anything that I'd have stumbled upon by myself. I like the settings you chose better than default, too.