A lot of disk space is taken up by a default Windows installation in various temporary 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.
Update after a long time.
Unfortunately, this question has been generalised to that for finding unused-and-large files left on the system by the user themselves. It was not meant to be addressing that space. It was meant to focus on stray things that take up space as a side effect of WindowsTM behaviour or that of applications made for it.
With the exception of a couple of answers, most are biased towards tools to help people find their own mess --
I was more interested in finding other-people's-mess.
Well, I am going to mark my own answer as accepted and leave it at that.
Those who want that data, will find it here and
others upvoting tools that help find misused space will show the rest what they want.
Answer
System Restore Points
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
- Control Panel,
Its quite deep and usually missed out.
Recycle Bin
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
Uninstall Folders
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)
RevoUninstaller
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.
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