Welcome to Shaun Luttin's public notebook. It contains rough, practical notes. The guiding idea is that, despite what marketing tells us, there are no experts at anything. Sharing our half-baked ideas helps everyone. We're all just muddling thru. Find out more about our work at bigfont.ca.

Save hard disk space in Windows.

Tags: windows, windows-8, windows 8.1, storage

TLDR;

  • Use CCleaner. It reduced my AppData folder significantly.
  • Remove build results by cleaning solutions in Visual Studio. This reduced my GitHub folder significantly.
  • The above two reduced my Users folder from 34% to 26% which is a savings of 4.7 GB.
  • Disable hibernation.
  • Uninstall unused programs.

I have a Surface Pro 3 with a 120 GB hard disk drive. I often run into storage limitations. Previously, I wrote about saving space by disabling hibernation. Here is a list of other things to do or not to do.

Examine the Usual Suspects with WinDirStat. Here are my stats on the computer named BigFont.

  • Windows (34% - 15.9 GB)
    • WinSxS (38% - 6.1 GB)
    • Installer (15% - 2.5 GB)
    • System32 (13% - 2.1 GB)
    • Other...
  • Users (34% - 14.7 GB)
    • BigFont (100%)
      • Documents (46% - 7.0 GB)
        • GitHub (99% - 6.9 GB)
          • 2014-121PZ (39% - 2.7 GB)
          • orchard-cms-modules-and-themes (31% - 2.2 GB)
          • 2014-123ST (10% - 701.4 MB)
      • AppData (44.2% - 6.2 GB)
      • OneDrive (8.7% - 1.3 GB)
    • Other...
  • Program Files (x86) (15.8%)
  • Program Files (9%)
  • ProgramData (6.2%)
  • Other...

GitHub

  • This is taking up 6.9 GB of space.
  • Most of the space is within is Orchard.Web\Modules
    • these come in between 15 MB and 1.9 GB.
    • The difference is because of build results in each modules \bin!
    • So, open Visual Studio and Clean the Solution! This will reduce it to about 15 MB from 1.9 GB.
  • Lots of the space is .jpegs
    • Get these out of the code.
    • They don't belong in version control.
    • Store them, for instance, in OneDrive offline only storage.

AppData

  • Install CCLeaner to save space in here.
    • You must close WinDirStat before installing,
    • lest you receive "error writing to file lang-1092.dll"
  • Once installed, just open it and click Run Cleaner (in the lower right corner.)

System32

  • Can I delete files from the System32 folder?
  • "The Windows System32 folder contains your Windows operating system's core system files.
  • "Most of these files are vital to the functioning of your computer.
  • "Microsoft strongly advices against modifying or deleting any of the contents within your System32 folder."

Installer

WinSxS

  • Clean up the WinSxS Folder
  • "One commonly asked question is can I delete the WinSxS folder to regain some disk space? The short answer is no."
  • Use Task Manager to manually run the StartComponentCleanup task
    • Windows already does this automatically,
    • so my theory is that running manually is a quick fix.
  • Use Deployment Imaging Service and Management (DSIM.exe)
    • /StartComponentCleanup is similar to the above Task Manager method
    • /ResetBase with /StartComponentCleanup does the same AND removes components that updates have replaced
    • /SPSuperseded removes any components necessary to uninstall a service pack
  • Disk Cleanup with System Files (no change)
    • Start Screen > "Disk Cleanup" > Free up disk space by deleting unnecessary files
    • Clean up system files
    • Choose Drives
    • Choose Files
    • Click Delete Files
    • More Options
      • Programs and Features, to uninstall programs
        • Remove programs freely.
        • Windows will warn you if you're going to break dependencies.
      • System Restore and Shadow Copies, delete all but the most recent restore point