Windows 7 Size

[benen]

Hi,
I've brought this up before but never got an answer. Ive just built a new home premium 64bit. All I installed was windows and Microsoft security essentials and 83gb of my 120gb ssd is used up. I used windows backup to create an image and that was only 28gb. I disabled hibernation using the command prompt but that only dropped a gig or so. Any ideas?

 

[Dermen]

Pagefile defaults to your amount of ram plus some. I usually set this to 2gb which frees up a lot of space. Some people set it to 1gb or even 512mb.

System restore uses 5% of your disk space, I do daily backups to a server so I disable it.

Recycling bin, I think this might also default to 5% of disk space. I don't store/delete large amounts of files on my C drive so I make it much smaller.

C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download is where Windows update downloads patch installers. They can safely be deleted and free up some space.

I'm surprised hibernation didn't free up a lot more space. I think you have to restart before it frees up the space but it is set to 75% of your ram by default, with 16gb it should have freed up around 12gb.

 

[Neuromancer]

Set pagefile to 512MB max. you have 16GB you could really get away with 50MB of PAgefile. Only reason to leave it at all is in case something looks for it to find it. It should not get used AT ALL.

The next big thing is hibernate.

Set power options to never go into standby then open CMD and type powercfg -h off this frees up another 16+GB of Space. EDIT: you have to do this from an elevated prompt IE type CMD in search box and right click the icon "run as administrator"

If using SP1 you shouldnt have issues with the crazy growing winSXS folder.

recycle bin and system restore can be adjusted to not use much space at all. In fact recycle bin can be set to use 0 MB. Unless you have a habit of using the recycle bin as a temporary storage folder, or accidently deleteing something you shouldnt, you can set the option to "delete automatically" I recommend leaving the prompt though

windows + all updates + antivirus software. = ~9.5GB used space.

EDIT: Clearing your IE and windows temp folders with ccleaner is a good idea as well. I use opera browser, so can manually set cache to be in memory (uses more RAM) and/or clear cache on exit. as well as set max sizes. flash cache has to be manually deleted at this point and time as far as I know. Important to know though since there are so many flash ads anymore. good idea to block flash overall and only allow it on sites you trust.

 

[benen]

Excellent tips. Cheers guys. I'll look into why my hibernation file didn't free up much space. I did restart. I'll see how small I can get it. Unfortunately I have iTunes, lightworks and adobe reader x installed now. Would have been nice to have a perfect small backup.

 

[Neuromancer]

Well itunes -minus library and cleared cache, + light works + adobe reader should not take up more than a couple hundred megabytes I would think.

(What is lightworks anyway.. I looked it up.. looks like something to do with quicktime.. a movie editor?)

So if you remove your library files you should still be able to get a nice small installation size to backup.

 

[benen]

Yeah exactly, everyhing I have installed is tiny. Lightworks is a high end Non-linear video editor similar to Final Cut Pro, Avid and Premiere. It was purchased by Edit Share and they made it freeware and plan to make it open source. It's only a 50mb download though.

 

[benen]

Sweet, got it down to 13gb. I can live with that. Thanks heaps guys.

 

[Neuromancer]

Glad to hear it, thanks for the update