I'm trying to free up space on my lappy's hard drive (I saved money by only getting the 128GB hard drive, which means 110GB). Basically, any suggestions on cutting back on space? The one thing I was eying was that my Vaio should have a recovery partition. If I can transfer that to my external hard drive, I should be able to save ~10GB. As it is, I got myself up to 25.6 free GB, which might be enough anyway, but my drives need about 12GB free so they can do their garbage-collection in peace, so that makes my actual space limit 14GB, which I'd like to increase. I'll be installing CAD programs, game expansions (SCII II and III, anyone? ), and I may want to increase my music library by a few GB, so... yeah. Halp?

Instant increase in GB equal to RAM size: Disable hibernation (screensaver - advanced).
Delete recycle bin
Start - Run - %temp% - delete contents in folder
Check your profile ( %userprofile% ) where the biggest space hogs are. Many many games save hundreds of MB in savegames there. Delete some older save files (not folders!) Make sure you show hidden and system files and folders.
Reduce size of of system restore data
Check your windows / office / whatever installations for unnecessary components
Reduce swap file. You shouldn't need more than 2GB in any case. You could set 500-2000 GB, so windows will use min size at first and will increase it as necessary. But careful, as the automated increase might take a minute or two.

May post more later.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 8 2010, 5:03 pm by NudeRaider.

Re-encode all your music to 128 kpbs lame/aac.
Download ccleaner.
Download EasyCleaner for its ability to find where all your space is being used in a neat pie graph.
Go ahead and uninstall all of your games, then reinstall them later. I assume you have the discs saved on the HDD. If that's the case, you can possibly burn them to a DVD for backup (do you really play all of them frequently enough for you to have it saved on your hard drive?).
Clear out your add/remove programs folder with only the stuff that you KNOW what it is. If you don't know what it does, or don't ever use it, uninistall it. There's a few things which you may or may not truly need, depending on what you use. MSXML and .net are required for some programs, but not all, and you can always redownload them. I recommend going ahead and uninstalling them, then check your most commonly used programs and see if they still work. If they do, you can safely continue without them. If they don't, install the latest version. For some reason, .net isn't recursive, so version 3.5 doesn't include 2.0 files, and you may need to install all 3 versions.
You can safely clean up the windows folder by deleting system32Hotfix installers usually found in the form of "$NtUninstallKBXXXXXX-XX$". Same deal with service pack files. Currently on my XP install, they're taking up 400 MB, though they're compressed. If you want to uninstall the hotfix, you can redownload it from windows update.


I find it rather amusing how you're talking about saving space here, and you're talking about "I don't need any more than 250 GB" in your desktop thread.

Also, if you have more than 2 GB of RAM, you don't really need a swap file. If you ever find yourself using a ton of memory and you only have 2 GB, you can turn it on. Just make sure you set the swap file to be one single file sector on the HDD, not in multiple pieces. Stick it to custom size and have the minimum/maximum size the same. Turn off hibernation too.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Aug 8 2010, 5:33 pm by rockz.

I believe you're confusing me with CAFG. Which I find quite insulting, Rockz.

Nude, I have no idea what parts of my installations are unnecessary, and I don't have many savegames yet (though I'll need to delete some later). Swap file is at 2% of HD, or about 2GB. Recycle bin was already checked; I set maximum size to 3GB and cleared it. And I actually like hibernation.

Thanks for Easycleaner, using it now. Rockz, I don't want to resort to it (I don't believe Zune supports it), but I'll keep the re-encoding an option. Will that be a... lossy transfer? On the games, I have two space hogs (SCII and WoW) which I don't currently want to juggle. I definitely expect to uninstall WoW after the next expansion. I already did most of the cleaning up, with the only remaining mystery programs being Sony stuff (though I cleared half of that out, too) which I'm unsure about. I don't really want to delete something I'm unsure about because the Sony drivers give me nice hotkeys for screen control, volume control, three extra buttons, recovery, and their Media Center (which is actually quite nice). I'll leave MSXML and .net alone; I don't really want to go through problems later.

Easy: The ones you're not using. E.g. if you're not making websites you can uninstall Publisher (Office) or if you're using Gimp you don't need MS paint (Windows)

Check your profile anyway there's usually more that you don't really need. Temp files, installation leftovers, etc.

Why can't you buy a bigger drive and clone it over?
A 250gb laptop drive only costs like 75 dollars.

Best way to get free space is to uninstall everything

I got the 128 GB because every additional 64GB cost $200. It's SSD's in Raid with built-in garbage collection, pretty hard to replace .

yes, it's a lossy transfer if it's a downscale.

Note on the sony stuff: they're nice, but I recommend you redownload them all, so you have the installers. Then uninstall them, and see what functionality disappears. Reinstall the ones you want.

Hrrm. I might try that. Later. <_<

Delete the Service Pack folder in WINDOWS, it'll be taking up like half a gig if you installed any service packs on that computer, and it's only there for a backup.

Also, if it's a laptop you likely have the i386 folder installed to your C: drive, it's basically a copy of the XP disc on your drive, so you can remove it.

Whatever you do, don't DELETE that recovery partition. Transferring it to another HD would possibly work, but make sure the copy works before deleting the old partition. Also, windows is lame when it comes to resizing partitions and such, and if you do it wrong you won't be able to access your main windows partition (specifically NTFS partition) without using a hex editor, a live CD with GPartEd, and some nifty terminal work.

Basically, partitions is srs bsns, be CAREFUL.

Actually, if you're proficient enough to acquire an OEM disc and reinstall Windows yourself, I would highly recommend deleting the recovery partition, since it's often loaded with bloatware and isn't worth the space.

For resizing the partition, I'd either recommend using EASEUS Partition Master on UBCD4Win, or get a GParted disc, either one should be able to resize it offline.

Well if he has a disk and COA, then go ahead and reformat the whole drive after backing up, or resize partitions and stuff.