W7 installation size

[Rex A. Butcher]

What ho one and all,

Similar to the previous thread, I have a refurbished computer with W7 Pro pre-installed. There is 4 gb of RAM and a single 250 gb hdd. I am only using the computer for watching DVD, other media files and 'catch-up' TV so it is connected to the internet.

The hdd came with four partitions, the first small one (apparently something to do with legacy programs?) C: (around 45 gb); D: most of the hdd and e: (about 2 gb) with Sys Vol information on it. I have no idea what e: does so have extended D: and now there only three partitions. Installed a few programs (partitioning, Acronis, VLC, another media player, Revo Uninstall); nothing very large.

When checking, I find I have 1.5gb of installed programs but the hdd reports as being around 80% full. Why does W7 take up so much space and is there anything I can remove to reduce it?

Thanks.

[Train]

Page file You will not believe its size
http://www.online-tech-tips.com/comp...e-paging-file/

Hibernation file
https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorial...-sys-file.html

Restore points
https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/5482...-in-windows-7/

Might want to look for a hidden folder with the name of Windows.old, if they just overinstalled a older install of Windows , it will be there.

[Rex A. Butcher]

Thanks.

Just been looking around and can see the culprit. Hib and page files are both less than 4 gb, but WinSXS folder is around 16gb!

Is there anything I can do to reduce or even delete it? I have been Googleing and it seems that it contains a lot of links to W7 file so is reported to be considerably larger than it actually is.

[Train]

Easily done. I just knew I did this at one time.
http://www.laptopmag.com/articles/cl...-to-save-space

[Rex A. Butcher]

Thanks. Done a bunch of stuff and C: is now down to18 gb, from around 32gb of a 45 gb partition. That is more reasonable.

[fink]

I used to run Win7 on a smaller SSD.. 64gigs. It took constant work to keep it around 30Gigs in size. I stored almost no media on it, had few large programs installed (Office, Trueimage and my a/v were the 3 biggest by far) no hibernation file (didn't need/use it) and kept my pagefile to a minimum by manually setting it to 2Gigs min and allowed it to get as large as it needed which meant it was usually around 2Gigs under normal circumstances but could grow easily if necessary.

I kept system restore points to 5% maximum and had very small caches set for my browser(s) and regularly used Windows file cleaner to get rid of old updates in WinSXS, Ccleaner and other temp file cleaners to get rid of junk.

The system worked just fine but eventually I got tired of the constant need for upkeep and bought a larger SSD for my OS drive (256Gigs). I still keep the system running lean but I don't have to obsess over it any more. It's usually around 40 Gigs now. I use the older, smaller SSD as a backup.

[Train]

Why my C; was 200 GB to start with.

[Rex A. Butcher]

Until a month ago I had no experience of W7. Was under the impression that it was the best thing since sliced bread after XP. But if it create such big files that occupy large amounts of hdd space, not so sure any longer.

However, got it down to around 18gb, defragged and made an image for safety. Watched a couple of things on BBC iPlayer, then before closing, ran cCleaner again. Wow, 2.4gb of WinSXS files have reappeared!

Looks like it really does need regular maintenance.

[Train]

Why 100 GB was recommended as a MINIMUM partition/hdd size.

[Rex A. Butcher]

I didn't know that. How large can WsinSXS get?

[Midknyte]

Mine is about 10GB on this particular machine. WinSXS has Windows System files in it including Windows Updates, so it will naturally get bigger over time. It also contains older copies of system files, so that you can uninstall/rollback Windows Updates if there are problems.

https://www.howtogeek.com/174705/how...indows-7-or-8/

The WinSXS folder contains all Windows system components. In fact, component files elsewhere in Windows are just links to files contained in the WinSXS folder. The WinSXS folder contains every operating system file.

When Windows installs updates, it drops the new Windows component in the WinSXS folder and keeps the old component in the WinSXS folder. This means that every Windows Update you install increases the size of your WinSXS folder. This allows you to uninstall operating system updates from the Control Panel, which can be useful in the case of a buggy update — but it’s a feature that’s rarely used.