By default Windows Vista allocates 15%-20% of your hard drive to storing System Restore points – which turns out to be a couple dozen gigabytes on a large drive. The user-friendly Windows XP slider bar which sets System Restore space has disappeared on Vista; instead a little command line action’s required to reset this percentage.
To recover some of that System Restore disk space, start up Vista’s command line as an administrator, and run vssadmin list shadowstorage to see the current allocation. To change it, use:
vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[drive]: /for=[drive]: /maxsize=
To limit System Restore to 1 gigabyte on the C: drive, use:
vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /for=C: /maxsize=1GB
