Question

A lot of disk space is taken up by a default Windows installation in various temperory and backup data that may never get cleaned up on its own. Eventually you realize that the large multi hundred gigabyte drive you installed on, is actually running out of space.

What are your favorite configuration tweaks and routine activities
on a standard Windows Installation to keep it tidy and clean from a disk utilization standpoint?

There are probably,

• many things on the border of being safe
• some very specific to the flavor of Windows (XP/Vista/7?)
• and, some that are specific to commonly used applications (Symantec?)

Please flag your answer with such cautions, information to indicate special conditions and warnings to your best knowledge.

I'll add my points as an answer.

Answer 1

I like WinDirStat, a free (open source) tool that scans the file system and visually presents statistics about your files. You can use this to determine which files are the largest, where is everything located, etc.

From the site:

WinDirStat reads the whole directory tree once and then presents it in three useful views:

• The directory list, which resembles the tree view of the Windows Explorer but is sorted by file/subtree size,
• The treemap, which shows the whole contents of the directory tree straight away,
• The extension list, which serves as a legend and shows statistics about the file types.

Answer 2

SpaceMonger is a handy utility for figuring out which files / directories are eating up your disk space. It produces a nice interactive graphical map where you can zoom in and out and delete things you don't need at your discretion.

Also Nlite and Vlite are useful for building stripped-down installation media for Windows XP and Vista respectively. You can leave out all the extras that you don't use so that your initial install footprint is smaller.

Answer 3

CCleaner is good, in the Windows options at the bottom you can clear up hotfix uninstallers, and other Windows stuff.

Answer 4

A Windows system creates System Restore points and the default configuration allows a lot of space to be reserved for these restore points. When you know that the system is not going to need 'uninstalls' (meaning, everything you recently installed is working fine) you can delete all but the most recent restore point.

This can be done from

• the "Free up space on your hard disk" option in
  • Control Panel,
    • Performance and Maintenance

Its quite deep and usually missed out.

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The Recycle Bin usually defaults to 10% of your disk partition (for each partition).
For a 100GB drive, this becomes 10GB reserved for recycle bin.

• you can reduce the default to a lower value more useful for your setup
• you can also choose to configure recycle storage individually for each partition

I also use this short cut to clean the recycle bin once in a while,

%windir%\system32\cleanmgr.exe /D

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Deleting Uninstall Folders.
Already mentioned in another answer here.
There is a script reference here.

Tested on Windows XP, Requires WScript and VBScript (which would be with most Windows OS)

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RevoUninstaller is a good freeware to cleanup stray files left around by application uninstalls. It does a pretty neat scan for files hanging around from a rough uninstall.
I also like CCleaner mentioned in another answer here.

Answer 5

• compcln.exe from an elevated command prompt. Makes service packs (Vista SP1+2) permanent but clears some of the backup files.

• vsp1cln.exe, the same thing but for Vista SP1

Answer 6

I don't know if these are still present in Vista/7, but in XP, the $NtUninstall**$ folders in your Windows directory can take up quite a bit of space and can be safely deleted (assuming you don't plan on ever needing to uninstall any Windows Updates).

Answer 7

Another thing you can delete merrily are subdirectories of C:\WINDOWS with names that begin and end with '$' and have the word "uninstall" in their names. These are backup system files from installations of service packs and OS updates. You'll see they are listed in blue; that means they're compressed. TYpically, you're never going to revert such updates.

These directories do NOT get erased by the Disk Cleanup tool in XP. I'm not certain about Vista or 7.

Answer 8

Vista (and, from what I've read, XP) does not always delete files when you empty the recycle bin. Sometimes they're stored in a $RECYCLE.BIN folder on your C drive. When I begin to get a little short on space, I delete the entire folder, which gets recreated (minus all of the files) automatically. To delete the folder, you should be in an elevated Explorer window.

I haven't found a good answer for why the files are there (mainly because I don't care enough to figure it out), but I get the idea that they're kept for restore points. If you feel like you're likely to do a system restore, I'd make a full backup of the drive first.

Answer 9

RidNacs is an easy to use and fast disk space usage analyzer. It scans your local drives, network drives or single directories and displays the results of the analysis in a tree view with a percentage bar.

This gives the user a quick and easy way to identify the largest directories and it's very useful for cleaning up the disk. The result of the scan can be exported in different formats (XML, HTML, CSV, TXT), so it could be printed or compared with future scans.

Besides of all these benefits RidNacs has an outstanding scan performance and it scores with a small memory footprint