What's taking up so much space?

Priori

Hi guys,

My 60GB SSD is currently 38.1GB full, but I can only account for just over 13GB's worth.

I'm running Windows 7 64 bit, and have system restore disabled.

Any ideas on what could be taking up this amount of space? I thought the C:/Windows folder contained all the operating system files? If not, I guess that would account for the discrepancy, as I realise Win 7 takes up between 20-25GB.

Torqay

Ask WinDirStat (free and open sauce)

Priori wrote: »

I realise Win 7 takes up between 20-25GB.

And it will keep growing and growing and growing (updates, WinSXS, etc.)

_AVALANCHE_

Torqay wrote: »

sauce

Nothingbetter2d

how big is your pagefile? (virtual ram) its usually set at 1.5 times your physical ram.

also prefetch folder will fill up your hard drive every so often.

see Here on how to empty the prefetch folder.

cookie1977

I wouldn't go deleting the contents of the prefetch folder. there's no significant benefit to be honest as it'll just fill up again and it's never that big. It's also useful.

Check
C:windows\softwaredistribution\download

Delete everything in there unless you plan on uninstalling some updates. Use CCleaner too:
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

unkel

What they said ^^^

And use ccleaner, will do a lot of cleaning for you

Still short of space? If you don't use it, disable hibernation. Should free up as many GB hard disk space as you have RAM

I too have my OS (W7, and since February, W8) on a 60GB SSD and I've plenty of space when I do a regular cleanup

Nothingbetter2d

cookie1977 wrote: »

I wouldn't go deleting the contents of the prefetch folder. there's no significant benefit to be honest as it'll just fill up again and it's never that big. It's also useful.

Check
C:windows\softwaredistribution\download

Delete everything in there unless you plan on uninstalling some updates. Use CCleaner too:
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

it does help particulary if there is old prefetch files for software that has been since removed.

also since OP uses an SSD drive its better to have prefetch turned off as it and defragging wears out the drive faster. see How to disable prefetch in windows 7

to disable Superfetch (which is not the same as prefetch) go How to disable superfetch

to disable automatic defraging on ssd drives go here How to disable autodefrag on ssd drives

Polar101

Recycle bin?

cookie1977

Nothingbetter2d wrote: »

it does help particulary if there is old prefetch files for software that has been since removed.

also since OP uses an SSD drive its better to have prefetch turned off as it and defragging wears out the drive faster. see How to disable prefetch in windows 7

to disable Superfetch (which is not the same as prefetch) go How to disable superfetch

to disable automatic defraging on ssd drives go here How to disable autodefrag on ssd drives

Well what ever about the advantages of stopping the service on an SSD drive my prefetch folder after 18months is only 38mb's in size so he won't recover much data from his either I suspect.

Torqay

Using prefetch on a SSD with an access time of 0.1 or 0.2 milliseconds? Sure...

riclad

GO to control panel,system, advanced, propertys, performance ,pagefile,
set size to x mb, my windows swapfile, pagefile was set to 3gig, i reduced it to 300meg.
See here ,http://kb.iu.edu/data/
ahbb.html you can move the pagefile to drive d ,if you have a drive d .
MY Drive c is 250gig, i would not like to use windows 7 on a drive less than 100gig.
Close down all browsers,run ccleaner program, it should free up at least 2gig, deletes all temp files , the first time you run it.Its a free download.
IT might be a good idea to also switch off drive indexing, right click drive c ,propertys, drive indexing, off.YOU may want to set ccleaner ,to not delete all cookies, eg some websites eg banking, facebook etc may need cookies to operate normally ,for login purposes.

U_Fig

Have you been encoding or transcoding video.. In the last few days I've been testing the ability of my laptop to transcode and stream hd content to my tv and the program I used stored the files to the SDD (120 ocz agility 3) but never deleted them afterwards so I won't from having 20gb to just 3gb after 2 movies had to manually delete the files ccleaner and windows built in cleaner both missed the files when I ran them.

Some program's can write large amounts of data to a drive n the bugs can stop it from being deleted..

Moon54

To save space on the SSD there's a few things you could do;

First, turn OFF the hibernation file.... go to command prompt, type ' powercfg -h off ' and that will save about 5-10GB of space.

Second, run CCleaner, that should free up a couple of GB's more.

Third, optionally, if you have a lot of RAM, you can disable the PAGE FILE. Only worthwhile if you 4+GBs of RAM. I've been happily running without a page file for a year now, with no problems... even though I do some heavy rendering and other tasks.

There's a good, common-sense SSD guide here;
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-performance-tweak,2911.html

Rabidlamb

You say you've turned System Restore off but have you deleted all but the most recent Restore Points ?.
They take up a huge amount of space on my HD.
Right click on your C: drive & go Properties, it's in there.

stevenf17

If you use chrome your cache/media cache can get huge pretty quickly too!
Check it @ C:\Users\*username*\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default
Just clear it from inside chrome rather than deleting this folder as your extensions are held in here too!

Mines already over 1.2GB after 2 months since the last clearout.

Priori

Thanks a million guys! I've now reduced the drive from 38.1GB down to 13.2!

The main culprits were the hibernation and page files - I disabled the former and reduced the latter to 2048MB (just to be on the safe side). 25GB cleared!

Ccleaner is a handy little program too - cleared 400MB.

Obviously I hadn't realised the knock-on effects of having 16GB of RAM installed...

unkel

Priori wrote: »

Obviously I hadn't realised the knock-on effects of having 16GB of RAM installed...

LOL, that was the cause of it alright

Glad you got sorted

Torqay

Priori wrote: »

reduced the latter to 2048MB (just to be on the safe side)

With 16 GB RAM you must have avery good reason to torture your SSD with a swap file...