Finishing off reinstalling the operating system...

After I had finished reinstalling Windows 7 and then getting it updated with all its 140 or so security patches and its official Service Pack One cumulative update (most of which was already done by those 140 patches) I took a look at the main window for 'Computer' to check those little bar graphs for my two partitions on the hard-drive. 

The one for the Win-7 x64 looked reasonable, but the other one, for the x86 or 32-bit version showed that it was rather impossibly using about 141 Gb of its 289 Gb partition. Something was wrong - and the something was me! I had not
checked to see where or if the System Protection was on or how it was set up.

So it's off to Control Panel > System, and in the left margin's column, to the item for System Protection, and here's a couple of images to help explain it.....

The little bar graphs after a fresh install of the operating system should look like this, and not take up half the space on its portion of the drive, unless you're saving too many backups and Restore Points, which you can adjust by going onto the System window from Control Panel, and then looking in its left margin
for System Protection, which when clicked shows the following.....

These are separate little windows, and you get to the one on the right by first opening the one on the left, and the rest is pretty-much self-explanatory I hope.
And after you've adjusted things to permit a reasonable amount of backup space - on a large drive you don't need a large percentage of it - then going back to that window above for Computer you will see those bar graphs, or just
one if you don't have your drive partitioned, in a much more reasonable spot
for just being installed.  By comparison, on my other computer, after it has had its Windows 7 installed and well used for years already, it shows the used portion of its drive at about 51 Gb, which isn't too unreasonable for all the use it has had and all the stuff I've added into it. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.....