The system restore function in windows XP takes snapshots of your system to be able to restore it back should something go horribly wrong. While this is a great function (if you know it exists) it also uses up resources both in processing time when monitoring and disk space to store the system state.

To disable system restore, choose system from the control panel (or press windows button + pause), select the system restore tab and enable "turn off system restore on all drives".

Make you've got a good backup strategy if you decide to turn off this feature.

Source: Computer Active: PC Tuning Solutions

Reference: All about System Restore in WinXP

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