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A Korean friend has a laptop with Windows 7 and a HDD of 60GB, with only a few MB of space left. Upon inquiry, she only uses 8GB, plus some mandatory Korean software (a few GB), and the problem resides with Windows itself as it is taking 40 of her 60 GB!

As a Korean she is stuck with Windows, but is there anything I can do to bring Windows back to its senses? I don't want to gain a few GB at this point, I am looking for a solution which would bring back some sanity to this system.

Winsxs takes up 17GB, and Installer 14 GB. System32 is reasonable with 3GB...

Edit: I'd like to stress she is not a power user. It's a mid range laptop that she uses ONLY FOR BROWSING. She never installed any software aside from the minimum needed in Korea to access websites and pay (which is why Koreans are stuck with using Windows). No games, nothing. I'd like to cut down on the Winsxs and Installer folders especially, but it seems Windows won't allow that. What do?

Shautieh
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2 Answers2

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  • Run the Disk Cleanup (also delete system files here).

  • You can safely delete the content of the following folders (close all programms before doing): C:\Windows\Temp\ C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Temp; Note: The Disk letter (in this case C) can be different. Replace "username" with yours. After that reboot.

  • If you don't need the hibernate function for that laptop, you can turn it off. This will will give you the amount of memory the laptop has, in disk space:

    1. open a command prompt (cmd) with administrative privileges
    2. type in the following command: powercfg -H off

  • If you have a second partition, you can change the location of the page file. Default it's on the system disk. Press Windows-Key + R, type control sysdm.cpl and hit enter. Click on tab "Advanced" and then again "Advanced" at "Performance". In the new window again "Advanced" and then click on "Change...". You could also change the size of the pagefile if you want - however it's not recommended to do that.

  • remove programs you don't need anymore.

So I think, this is it what you can do within windows directly without a risk, damaging your OS. To get more space you have to delete data you don't need. To find huge amount of used space, the Tool Treesize Free, mentioned above is a good go.

Bernhard Laven
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As an addition to the already present answer here, I'd like to expand on the "remove programs you don't need anymore" part. Removing programs (i.e. uninstalling them) is often not enough - they might be sloppy and leave some files around. Mostly that's not a problem if the files are a few kilobytes in size, but some applications leave around huge amounts of data. One way to get rid of this is to actually look for it and delete it. Look in C:/Program Data for example, and you might find a folder with the name of a program you uninstalled, that still takes up space!

However, just looking around is inefficient, so I would recomment installing WinDirStat to analyze the disk and get a nice summary of what is taking up the most space, in descending order. That way you can take a look at the "biggest offenders" at once, and see if you can do something about them.

Caution: be careful when deleting program files. Only delete folders from a program you know you have uninstalled, if there's something that you don't know what it is, it's better to leave it, because it might be important.

So fo example, let's say you uninstalled Opera. If you see a folder somewhere called Opera with a lot of files inside, you can probably delete that. If you however see something cryptic like "mscbx22" (just made that up), don't delete it if you don't know what it is.

Ludwik
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