Vista hard drive space

Caporegime
Joined
9 May 2005
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31,703
Location
Cambridge
I've just been looking at my mrs laptop. 140 gb hard drive with 70gb used. For the life of me I can't find whats eating that space. She has the operating system on, office and 15gb of pictures. Nothing else apart from virus software.

Recycle bin is empty, can't find any large files. Anything obvious I should be looking for, run a defrag?
 
Soldato
Joined
16 Dec 2005
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14,443
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Manchester
Use WinDirStat!

It scans your HDD and creates a graphical view of your filesystem. Each file is represented by a rectangle. The bigger the rectangle, the larger the file. You can click on the rectangle and it shows you exactly what file it is.
 
Soldato
Joined
16 Jan 2003
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10,561
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Nottingham
But why does it count against my available HD space ?

It's counted wrong, If I right click my Windows folder and check the size it displays the following

windowsv.jpg


Yet my entire C drive shows as the following

49749762.jpg


As it's impossible for the Windows folder to take up more space than the entire C drive that it's on, it's obvious that Windows doesn't read the size of the winsxs folder properly.
 
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Caporegime
Joined
25 Jul 2005
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28,851
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Canada
I had major issues with the sxs folder as well after 2 years. Vista was installed on a 40GB partition but the partition was full. It was apparently around 17GB in size. Had to reinstall in the end as I got bored of having to delete the system restore every couple of weeks.

As for the above post I my everything I could find (not including the sxs folder) weighed in at a wopping 14ish GB (program files, windows, pagefile etc) and system restore took up around 3GB so there was around 17GB of storage space that should have been left, there wasn't so it must mean something.

Unfortunately there is no way of deleting the legacy Dlls without trashing your system.

EDIT: Just found the thread I made about it http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18050403
 
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Soldato
Joined
16 Dec 2005
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14,443
Location
Manchester
The DLLs are only around as long as software needs it. So it is good practice to uninstall any software you no longer use and keep the rest as up to date as possible.
 
Caporegime
Joined
25 Jul 2005
Posts
28,851
Location
Canada
Unfortunately a lot of the Dlls stay in place which means uninstalling does nothing (I had about 20 small programs installed in the end and it didn't make a jot of difference.
 
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