Vista "Cancel or Allow" & HDD Issues

I've always heard about how bad Windows Vista was since it first came out. I always figured that there was no need to get Vista, and with all those complaints about all those Vista problems, who would actually buy it? Well aside from all the complaints people were raising, the cool new aero effects looked pretty nice, but then again visual effects like that do tend to slow your computer's performance down and this was probably the case for most people getting Vista on their decently old computers. I was perfectly happy with Windows XP, but now all the new computer come with Vista pre-installed and after buying a brand new kick ass machine, I figured I might as well leave Vista on it and get used to it. It's not so bad, and I heard Vista Service Pack 1 fixed most of the problems people were running into. Since this is a new machine, I can keep all the cool Vista effects running without having to worry about performance issues as well. It's a win-win game right? Not really. I have run into some problems after about a month's use of Windows Vista and I'll talk about them here and give you some solutions that I found for them.

The first major annoyance is what gives Mac users their little hard-ons every time they see it pop-up on a Windows Vista computer. Yes, you guessed it, the "Cancel or Allow" security feature that Vista comes with. It was designed to protect us from unauthorized programs from staring up and performing tasks by themselves if Vista doesn't recognize them. Every time such an action would occur, your screen goes dim and an alert window like the one above would appear and you would have to choose if you want to allow to program to go ahead and do what it has to do, or cancel it and block it from running. It's a nice security add-on, but the way it works on Vista is just a major nuisance. You get an alert window for every little thing that you try to run. You like to download music, pictures, games, or anything else right? Well guess what pops up every time you try to download something? Yea, you guessed it, "Cancel or Allow". If I had to rate this feature on an annoyance scale of 1-10, I would give it a 10 without hesitation. After a few days of putting up with this, I found a way to turn it off by mistake. I needed to find a solution to play a MMORPG and this was one of the solution, and what do you know, it actually worked. No more alert windows ever again. To get rid of this alert, you'll have to disable the User Account Control (UAC). It'll make your system less secure, but a hell lot less of a nuisance. Here is a nice simple guide on how to disable the UAC, click here.

The second thing I've noticed on my new computer ever since I got it was that every day a few gigabytes(GB) of memory would randomly disapear. After about a month of using this computer, I had about 100GB of space used up on my drive and I had no idea why the usage was that high. I have downloaded games, music, pictures, and other things, but my memory usage for all of those things would be 10GB max. I was confused as hell and tried running a tool that came with my computer that checks for Hard Disk Errors and fixes them. After running the tool and about an hour and a half of waiting, it was able to free up about 9GB of space, but I still had a lot of space missing. So I decided to just my friend Mr. Google to find out what the deal was and I came to find out Vista's System Restore feature was eating up loads of my space to create restore points. The worst part is, it creates them automatically almost every day and it doesn't even let you know that it's doing it. This is not really a bad thing because if something messes up and you need to restore to an earlier time, you'll have it up and running. I also found out that Vista's default settings are set to use up to 15% of your hard drive's space for its restore points. I have a ~500GB Hard Drive, and I found out that Vista was using up about 75GB to create restore points on my HDD. To free up that space, I simply deleted the restore points that were created and regained all of that wonderful space back.

This is how I deleted the restore points if anyone wants to know:

1. Go to "My Computer"

2. Right click on "C:" or your main Hard Drive which is "C:" by default.

3. Click on Properties

4. Under the "General" tab by the pie chart of your C: Drive click Disk Cleanup

5. Wait for it to finish scanning

6. Click on the "More Options" tab

7. Under "System Restore and Shadow Copies" click the "Clean up..." button

8. Hit delete and you're done

That's how to delete the restore points and free up all of that space, but now you have to change the amount of Disk Space that you want to allow System Restore to use to create its restore points. I changed mine from allowing the max amount of space (~75GB) to only allowing it to use up 5GB of space to create the restore points. Here is a simple tutorial on how to configure this amount, click here to view it. All in all, the less space you give it will lower the amount of restore points you have when you have to do a system restore, but if you know what you're doing on your computer and don't run around downloading everything you see, you won't have to use the System Restore option that often.

I hope this helps someone with these issues, and if it does leave a comment to say thanks.