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James Fallows

James Fallows - James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States, and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book, China Airborne, will be published in May.
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James Fallows is based in Washington as a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has worked for the magazine for nearly 30 years and in that time has also lived in Seattle, Berkeley, Austin, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and Beijing. He was raised in Redlands, California, received his undergraduate degree in American history and literature from Harvard, and received a graduate degree in economics from Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. In addition to working for The Atlantic, he has spent two years as chief White House speechwriter for Jimmy Carter, two years as the editor of US News & World Report, and six months as a program designer at Microsoft. He is an instrument-rated private pilot. He is also now the chair in U.S. media at the US Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, in Australia.

Fallows has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award five times and has won once; he has also won the American Book Award for nonfiction and a N.Y. Emmy award for the documentary series Doing Business in China. He was the founding chairman of the New America Foundation. His two most recent books, Blind Into Baghdad (2006) and Postcards From Tomorrow Square (2009), are based on his writings for The Atlantic; he is at work on another book about China. He is married to Deborah Fallows, author of the recent book Dreaming in Chinese. They have two married sons.

Fallows welcomes and frequently quotes from reader mail sent via the "Email" button below. Unless you specify otherwise, we consider any incoming mail available for possible quotation -- but not with the sender's real name unless you explicitly state that it may be used. If you are wondering why Fallows does not use a "Comments" field below his posts, please see previous explanations here and here.
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More on clash of the titans: Windows Vista vs my hard drive

By James Fallows

Jul 13 2007, 10:21 AM ET

Noting with sympathy the plight I described recently -- a 110-gigabyte hard drive drying up like the Aral Sea with each hour's use of Windows Vista -- several readers helpfully wrote to suggest utilities that might solve the problem.

Two in particular: SequoiaView, and TreeSize Professional. Both offer free demos; both are quick and easy to install; both look elegantly designed.


But, no dice.



SequoiaView show me exactly what my existing application, Explorer Plus, had found: an known universe of 32 - 34 gigabyte worth of files. The two largest files, predictably, were a "hibernate" file and a "page" file, each about 2 gigs in size to mirror the available memory in this machine.

TreeSize came up with an additional 10 gigs of file, for a total of 44 gigabytes used. Remember, the disk started with a total of 110 gigs; has a "restore" partition of about 10 gigs -- but right at this moment shows an alarming 4.67 gigs of free space.

That leaves 50 gigabytes of dark matter -- space used up on the disk but not detectable by normal means. I assume it's in the general category of "backup" -- "shadow" files and "version" information, to let me restore the system to a previous configuration. Fine. Problem is, with so little free disk space I can barely use the configuration it's now in. Vista, what's going on?

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