My C:\Windows folder takes 9.21GB, is it too large?

A

Author

I am a .net application developer, so my Windows XP box has the
following applications (among others) installed:

Visual Studio 2005
Visual Studio 2008
SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition
SQL Server 2008 Express Edition
MS Office 2007 Enterprise Edition

My C partition has only 24.4G and now I am experiencing low disk
space.

However, the C:\Windows folder alone takes about 9.21GB. Is this
normal? I think it is too large. I suspect this folder must have
collected a lot of garbage.

Is there anyway to clean it up?

Please kindly share your two cents. Thanks a lot.
 
1

1PW

I am a .net application developer, so my Windows XP box has the
following applications (among others) installed:

Visual Studio 2005
Visual Studio 2008
SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition
SQL Server 2008 Express Edition
MS Office 2007 Enterprise Edition

My C partition has only 24.4G and now I am experiencing low disk
space.

However, the C:\Windows folder alone takes about 9.21GB. Is this
normal? I think it is too large. I suspect this folder must have
collected a lot of garbage.

Is there anyway to clean it up?

Please kindly share your two cents. Thanks a lot.

It's very likely that with a slightly more ambitious cleanup utility,
like CCleaner, you could reclaim more free space, temporarily. However,
your applications are probably taking up much of the space on C: and as
more updates are released for your OS and apps, what little free space
you have will be dwindling.

It's probably time to plan an upgrade to a larger hard disk drive. With
HDD prices under $100USD for an internal IDE 500GB, a pair would
probably see you through to the EOL of your computer and give you
something to image your complete C: drive to for backup.

If the computer itself is /occasionally/ slow, perhaps it's time for a
whole system upgrade.

My $0.02USD.

Pete
 
J

John John (MVP)

You will have to find out which folder(s) is using the disk space, usual
suspects would be the installer and CSC folders.

John
 
S

SC Tom

Use TreeSize Free to find out exactly where the room has gone.
http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml
It's quick, easy, free, and has a small footprint. There may be other
folders that contain things that could be gotten rid of to free up some more
space.
But, as Pete said, with the relatively cheap prices of hard drives it would
probably be a better solution to add one or two to your box.

SC Tom
 
T

Twayne

Author said:
I am a .net application developer, so my Windows XP box has the
following applications (among others) installed:

Visual Studio 2005
Visual Studio 2008
SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition
SQL Server 2008 Express Edition
MS Office 2007 Enterprise Edition

My C partition has only 24.4G and now I am experiencing low disk
space.

However, the C:\Windows folder alone takes about 9.21GB. Is this
normal? I think it is too large. I suspect this folder must have
collected a lot of garbage.

Is there anyway to clean it up?

Please kindly share your two cents. Thanks a lot.

That's not out of line for drive space, especially considering the room
taken by the msdn subscriptions, etc.. There is no solution with what
you have that will be anything but temporary. I'd be willing to be you
aren't backing up either from the sound of it, so a reasonable solution
might be:
-- Get a 500 Gig or 1 TeraByte external drive for backups. They're
inexpensive right now.
-- Install an imaging program for your backups; Ghost, Acronis,
whatever.
-- Learn and implement a good backup strategy to protect your data
from catastrophe.
-- Get a 500 Gig internal drive to replace the one you have. The above
would finish running you out of room.
-- Your System Partition should be in the order of 50 Gig or more to
allow for some expansion and future growth. You are really squeezing to
try to keep a dev system in 24 Gig.
-- Be sure you have the requisite AV and spyware arsenal to keep you
system secure, along with hopefully a NAT router and a 2-way software
firewall, especially if you ever accept disks/files from any source
other than the 'net.
-- Keep Event Viewer free of errors and warnings and lock the system
down the best you can. Research further if you need to.

My 2 ¢ anyway,

Twayne
 
G

Gerald Cornell

Is your C partition the only partition on the hard drive? How much free disk
space do you have on the C partition?

You can create more free space in C by
carrying any of the measures suggested below.

The default allocation to System Restore is 12% on your C partition
which is over generous. I would reduce it to 700 mb. Right click your My
Computer icon on the Desktop and select System Restore. Place the cursor
on your C drive select Settings but this time find the slider and drag
it to the left until it reads 700 mb and exit. When you get to the
Settings screen click on Apply and OK and exit.

A default setting which could be wasteful is that for temporary internet
files, especially if you do not store offline copies on disk. The
default allocation is 3% of drive. Depending on your attitude to offline
copies you could reduce this to 1% or 2%. In Internet Explorer select
Tools, Internet Options, General, Temporary Internet Files, Settings to
make the change. At the same time look at the number of days history is
held.

The default allocation for the Recycle Bin is 10 % of drive. Change to
5%, which should be sufficient. In Windows Explorer place the cursor
on your Recycle Bin, right click and select Properties, Global and
move the slider from 10% to 5%. However, try to avoid letting it get
too full as if it is full and you delete a file by mistake it will
bypass the Recycle Bin and be gone for ever.

If your drive is formatted as NTFS another potential gain arises with
your operating system on your C drive. In the Windows Directory of
your C partition you will have some Uninstall folders in your Windows
folder typically: $NtServicePackUninstall$ and $NtUninstallKB282010$
etc. These files may be compressed or not compressed. If compressed
the text of the folder name appears in blue characters. If not
compressed you can compress them. Right click on each folder and
select Properties, General, Advanced and check the box before Compress
contents to save Disk Space. On the General Tab you can see the amount
gained by deducting the size on disk from the size. Folder
compression is only an option on a NTFS formatted drive / partition.

Select Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, System
Information, Tools, Dr Watson and verify that the box before "Append to
existing log" is NOT checked. This means the next time the log is
written it will overwrite rather than add to the existing file.

The default maximum size setting for Event Viewer logs is too large.
Reset the maximum for each log from 512 kb to 128 kb and set it to
overwrite.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308427/en-us



--



Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
S

Shenan Stanley

Author said:
I am a .net application developer, so my Windows XP box has the
following applications (among others) installed:

Visual Studio 2005
Visual Studio 2008
SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition
SQL Server 2008 Express Edition
MS Office 2007 Enterprise Edition

My C partition has only 24.4G and now I am experiencing low disk
space.

However, the C:\Windows folder alone takes about 9.21GB. Is this
normal? I think it is too large. I suspect this folder must have
collected a lot of garbage.

Is there anyway to clean it up?

Please kindly share your two cents. Thanks a lot.

Are you having problems you think this is the root cause of?

If you are comfortable with the stability of your system, you can delete the
uninstall files for the patches that Windows XP has installed...
http://www3.telus.net/dandemar/spack.htm
( Particularly of interest here - #4 )
( Alternative: http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_hotfix_backup.htm )

You can run Disk Cleanup - built into Windows XP - to erase all but your
latest restore point and cleanup even more "loose files"..

How to use Disk Cleanup
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310312

You can turn off hibernation if it is on and you don't use it..

When you hibernate your computer, Windows saves the contents of the system's
memory to the hiberfil.sys file. As a result, the size of the hiberfil.sys
file will always equal the amount of physical memory in your system. If you
don't use the hibernate feature and want to recapture the space that Windows
uses for the hiberfil.sys file, perform the following steps:

- Start the Control Panel Power Options applet (go to Start, Settings,
Control Panel, and click Power Options).
- Select the Hibernate tab, clear the "Enable hibernation" check box, then
click OK; although you might think otherwise, selecting Never under the
"System hibernates" option on the Power Schemes tab doesn't delete the
hiberfil.sys file.
- Windows will remove the "System hibernates" option from the Power Schemes
tab and delete the hiberfil.sys file.

You can control how much space your System Restore can use...

1. Click Start, right-click My Computer, and then click Properties.
2. Click the System Restore tab.
3. Highlight one of your drives (or C: if you only have one) and click on
the "Settings" button.
4. Change the percentage of disk space you wish to allow.. I suggest moving
the slider until you have just about 1GB (1024MB or close to that...)
5. Click OK.. Then Click OK again.

You can control how much space your Temporary Internet Files can utilize...

Empty your Temporary Internet Files and shrink the size it stores to a
size between 64MB and 128MB..

- Open ONE copy of Internet Explorer.
- Select TOOLS -> Internet Options.
- Under the General tab in the "Temporary Internet Files" section, do the
following:
- Click on "Delete Cookies" (click OK)
- Click on "Settings" and change the "Amount of disk space to use:" to
something between 64MB and 128MB. (It may be MUCH larger right
now.)
- Click OK.
- Click on "Delete Files" and select to "Delete all offline contents"
(the checkbox) and click OK. (If you had a LOT, this could take 2-10
minutes or more.)
- Once it is done, click OK, close Internet Explorer, re-open Internet
Explorer.

You can use an application that scans your system for log files and
temporary files and use that to get rid of those:

Ccleaner (Free!)
http://www.ccleaner.com/

Other ways to free up space..

SequoiaView
http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/

JDiskReport
http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/index.html

Those can help you visually discover where all the space is being used.

In the end - a standard Windows XP installation with all sorts of extras
will not likely be above about 4.5GB to 9GB in size. If you have more space
than that (likely do on a modern machine) and most of it seems to be used -
likely you need to copy *your stuff* off and/or find a better way to manage
it.
 

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