windows disk space and other thoughts

My hard disk was down to 3 gigs last night, so I thought I would try and figure out where my space was going. Of course there are a lot of places to look, but heres what I found, that claimed 3 gigs of space.
It appears windows has a "system restore" feature for windows itself. Since it doesn't actually help with your installed apps being broken, I took the chance, and turned it off via the "System" control panel.
Disk space savings: 3gig!
After turning System restore off (and clearing the disk space), you can turn it back on, and create a restore point manually. (instructions)
I handle my own backups, such that if my windows gets whacked, then I would do a full restore of my drive. Here's a free and easy way to backup:

1. Buy an external firewire or USB 2.0 drive
2. Download driveimage xml
   
3. Backup your stuff!
4. If you want the ability to boot off of something else (like CD), get a copy of BartPE builder.
5. This allows you to boot off of the CD drive (check your BIOS), and use your backup to replace your "c" drive.
6. When you create your BartPE boot disk, put driveimage xml on the disk. See these instructions.
   

Then, I realized I could also save some disk IO by turning off Content Indexing. This appears to make little difference in my searches, as I typically search within a directory or two anyway.
My computer- properties of disk (c:) - "allow indexing" checkbox.