A thing called 'Disk Cleanup' - important for Win 7 users

Published on February 8, 2014 By Jafo In Personal Computing

As some will know....I've been doing the hand-me-down process with computers after getting a Core 2 Duo for $6.40 that was better than several machines I already had.

Now, one of them is a sad old P4 1.6 with 1gig of ram and a 20gig HD.... running Win 7 Pro 32.

And there's the trouble...the little HD ....the OS was 'struggling' [to put it mildly].

A little proggy called 'scanner' a pie-chart display of disk usage [files] soon made it well and truly clear....

Free space on the drive was 200meg ....yes, that's meg.

The biggestestest usage was the folder called 'winsxs' ....it was about 8gig!

Now, after researching I was reminded of why MS does 'Service Packs' .... it's a way to set an option for redundancy of all those update backup files etc. released each month/whatever that ultimately clogs the OS drive - PARTICULARLY this 'winsxs' that is otherwise NOT removable manually.

Because MS came out with a dog of an OS called '8' and people are sticking with 7 ..... AND 7 has only had the ONE Service Pack ...since then those updates have been growing...and growing...to the point your system will CHOKE...if it's on a small drive [think SSDs].

Now, one of those 'updates' you will have received is a particular clean-up tool called....wait for it....'Disk Cleanup' [creative imaginative thinkers, at MS].

Just type 'disk cleanup' into the search bar...and watch the magic.

A VM of Win 7 Ult 64 got 5gig lighter.

My poor sick P4 1.6 gained a quick 2gig....well on the way to recovery [I finally cleaned enough to get 25% free drive space....about as little as you can get away with for an OS.

Now, this isn't the same old thing that has been a cleanup option for years.... it's new because it handles files you can't otherwise 'mess with'.

You CAN manually cull the windows/softwaredistribution/downloads entries...but not what they 'installed' into winsxs..... and Disk Cleanup does them both...

Comments

kryo

on Feb 08, 2014

The biggestestest usage was the folder called 'winsxs' ....it was about 8gig!

The side by side component store isn't as big as most apps report it. The current versions of system files are hard linked from their actual 'live' locations, so they get often double-counted by things that tell you how much space is being consumed. Just uninstalling stuff elsewhere can shrink it too.

SxS is the 'solution' to DLL Hell. Though it's less useful these days... apps should typically not reference a particular build of a third party library if they can help it, as it's expected that breaking changes will be confined to security issues or major versions. But if they do, deleting SxS files can break them.

All that said, if that was an older Windows install, then what you gained back were probably the backup files from pre-SP1.

RedneckDude

on Feb 08, 2014

Good post, Paul!

Jafo

on Feb 08, 2014

kryo

reply 1

The biggestestest usage was the folder called 'winsxs' ....it was about 8gig!

The side by side component store isn't as big as most apps report it. The current versions of system files are hard linked from their actual 'live' locations, so they get often double-counted by things that tell you how much space is being consumed. Just uninstalling stuff elsewhere can shrink it too.

SxS is the 'solution' to DLL Hell. Though it's less useful these days... apps should typically not reference a particular build of a third party library if they can help it, as it's expected that breaking changes will be confined to security issues or major versions. But if they do, deleting SxS files can break them.

All that said, if that was an older Windows install, then what you gained back were probably the backup files from pre-SP1.

Yes, the size IS misquoted ... but even 100% wrong what I'm typing on [the P4 1.6 with 20gig hd] would be 4gig,,,[it shows as 8].

This MS 'fix' will clear what can be cleared - it's supposedly a built-in feature of 8... so it's a bit of backward-compatibility for 7 users.

At least now, on this thing...even if still overly misquoted...I have freespace headroom.... so all's good...

Fuzzy Logic

on Feb 09, 2014

I run disk cleanup on a regular basis. It's not before time MS produced a useful tool.

Another good tip is to have CCleaner load on startup and target any folders you might have filling with junk.

For example: I use a Nikon camera. The Nikon NX processing software creates a thumbnail cache which can grow like topsy if you don't watch it - caught it at 2Gb+ once. CCleaner empties this folder on startup so no more space hogging

Tip for Sins players - you might want to check your save folders, they pile up pretty quick too

DrJBHL

on Feb 09, 2014

There's a nice tutorial on how to use this utility here:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/818-disk-cleanup-open-use.html

Wrote about this tool on 10/9/13 and reminded folks once thereafter, I believe...but thanks for the reminder.

Jafo

on Feb 09, 2014

DrJBHL

reply 5

Wrote about this tool on 10/9/13 and reminded folks once thereafter, I believe...but thanks for the reminder.

Back then I thought it was the 'old' one....as you find in XP, etc. , not the update/release MS did for 7 ...

Sinperium

on Feb 10, 2014

Oh yeah...I remember this.

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