Hanselman windows 7 space

WinDirStat in particular, is great. Raul Popescu. Man, the day you get a solution to clean the winsxs directory, you'll get surely the peace nobel prize. I am quite anal when it comes to cleaning up disk space as I run a lot of virtual environments on very expensive and limited SSD drives.

I can't wait for the Data Deduplication feature that ships with the next version of Windows Server. CCleaner does do a pretty good job and takes care of most of the points in your post. It also gets rid of many other space hogs such as IIS log files, which tend to grow a lot if you are doing a lot of development.

Jeroen Ritmeijer. CCleaner does a great job on lots of known apps like the various browsers, cleaning up cache and compacting their internal databases. Hi Scott, Another great article, thanks! Did you know that HDGraph 1. Folder size win32 is a great small no dependency program for visually see whats taking space.

Mattias Karlsson. This saves a lot of space. Also uninstall older updates like older and replace IE updates. Just a couple of notes. Just hit your Windows key, type in "disk", find the entry, right click, and choose "Run as administrator". Also you should open up your command prompt for any commands in administrator mode as well. James Manning. Another tip that's not on the list, but is quite the disk space saver is the following. On next boot the pagefile. Ivan Zlatev.

I'm fond of Disk Space Fan - not open source, but has a free version and looks pretty. Windows is very bad at using disk space wisely. What is safe to delete and the safe way to delete it is confusing enough for geeks - there is no way I'd recommend this to the average user. I think Microsoft assumed we'd all be on multi-terabyte drives now and didn't see the rise of SSDs coming.

I hope Microsoft has spent major effort fixing this in Win 8 - I don't want to be deleting restore points and temp folders when my 16 GB tablet says it has no room left for an ebook! Michael C. The other thing was hiberfil. Please note, the following should definitely be considered to have Scott's "Work's on my computer" disclaimer applied to it. Some of these are great and include things I've always wished the original CCleaner had.

As long as you pay attention you should be able to get CCleaner to remove even more of the junk you didn't want hanging around. It's also nice to see how the additional definitions are added so you can add your own later if you are a super-geek power user. Christopher Motter. November 27, I recommend TreeSize. While I'm as much of a fan of WinDirStat as you are, I think your comment that it's actively developed is a bit inaccurate, as the last available file on sourceforge is dated !

You are writing about precious SSD C: drive and later that it is good to defrag just to tidy up.. I've just run the Desktop Cleanup and what a difference: 1. Randolph West. November 28, Henning Eiben. Simon Harriyott. I second the suggestion for TreeSize Free edition.

I install it every time. Ronnie Overby. Recently my small GB SSD main drive was pretty full despite my effort to discard unused stuff, and CCleaner freed 17GB in just a few seconds, without any 'bad surprise' so far. Your advices are especially useful nowadays, when developers are using small but fast SSD drives. So I am glad this upgrade to Win7 is possible without major issues.

This doesn't migrate non-OS apps though, does it? Microsoft Office? Visual Studio? If a reinstall of apps is needed, I wouldn't consider it an upgrade - just a user file migration. I haven't used the process myself yet though, so perhaps I'm mistaken? Brad Kingsley. Thanks for the info: Just out of curiosity, I have an XP machine with a c: and d: drive. The d: drive is my app repository that i want left alone in case i have to format the c: drive. Is it possible to install win 7 on my c: drive without having to format or mess with the d: drive?

Pat Lindley. It doesn't sound like it migrates any apps at all. I do believe there are some 3rd party apps out there to do that though. Hopefully they will be updated to work with Win7 when it hits the shelves. I think MS is hurting adoption somewhat by not providing some sort of straight upgrade capability. I think the migration process might be beyond the capabilities of many home users, or at least they will think it is.

One note about your upgrade process: I know they're not too common yet, but if the machine being upgraded contains a solid state disk drive, I would let Win7 delete the partition and re-create it, rather than just reformatting. This will ensure that the partition is aligned properly on the disk, which Win7 does but XP does not.

Not aligning the partition can hinder performance on an SSD. Brad - It doesn't migrate programs, but it does to all settings. So, after I reinstalled Office 15 minutes all the settings were already present. Pat - Yes, totally. Just don't tell Win7 about your D drive. You can format the C: or, if you like, just install on top of it.

Mike - Nope, it doesn't. It brings settings. More questions if you don't mind And did it migrate product keys? Or do the products need to be reactivated? If they do need to be reactivated, I hope Microsoft accounts for this and enables the additional online activation to smooth that process. August 05, So umm And if not, how did they get the Win7 RTM build? I am thrill of joy :p that VS works as expected, but what about II7?

Thanks in advance and. August 06, For those like me who've accumulated numerous apps, I strongly recommend running Belarc Advisor first. It does the best system inventory I've seen, and I find it really helpful for migrations.

Belarc Advisor is free and I have no connection to it except as a grateful fan. After reading this I am glad I did not even try this - what a royal pain. I found the same links, but could not locate the easy transfer utility 7" EEE screen wasn't helping and decided to just wing it.

I just ran the install and did not format or delete everything. Win7 just moves all the old data into a windows. Took about a quarter of the time. Unless you have some pretty complex stuff going on I would bypass this "ease" transfer tool. August 13, Yes you can. I did. Jon Davis. August 14, After that, your instructions worked fine, and I installed successfully on two machines.

Very nice. Jim Lynn. Don't know why, but it checks early in the setup process. Jeff Key. All goes well until the installation tries to modify my boot configuration. Then there is an error message saying that it cannot modify it and the installation is cancelled.

Any idea what could be the reason for this? Eric D. I'm running into the same issue as kaiz. Thomas Levesque. Don't add a colon. Just tried again with the VHD on C:. Any idea? March 03, Thomas, that was a great tip, thanks!

I moved the VHD to c: and it works now. No BSOD for me. The previously used disk is on a dynamic volume mirror managed by Windows and that might have been the problem. Anything special about your c: or your BIOS? I actually navigated off :P. That "works on my machine" graphic made coffee come out of my nose. Damn, that's funny. William Noel. Hi Scott, I'm having the same issue as Thomas and Kaiz. If I put the vhd on any drive other than C, at the end of the install it says "could not configure the computer's boot configuration" and install fails.

I then proceeded to mount a 60 empty partition into a folder in C:. I created the vhd in that folder. I installed to that vhd and install succeeded. I don't have the option of simply putting the vhd on the C: partition as it doesn't have enough free space. Also, you mention locate - where would this be used and how?

Can I do this on a Mac? Why do you think so? The only hard part would be updating the bootloader from Windows 7 to Windows 8 without actually installing Windows 8. Any ideas here? This is a great idea. As a main dev machine. Someone please talk me out of this. If you already have a VHD with Windows 8 Developer preview, installing the new version is even easier. Just format the VHD and then install the new version on it - no need to fiddle with any boot options since that is already working.

Christian Wenz. March 04, Finished installation on Mac had to install to VHD since bootcamp doesn't support two Windows installations. Aside from a problem with bootcamp setup not wanting to start everything went fine. Running bcdboot. I thought it would only add 8 to the 7's OS list. Where can you set boot options to always appear on boot up? This is fun! Noel Arlante.

I'm planning to transfer GB of data to a HDD where my win8 will be as the only OS I just need to run VS for work together with say other smaller tools and one big framework - so I'm not building entertaining-home-centre-machine with not-compatibile stuff appz - just MS tools on great Intel rig. Then it would make sense for me to do a VHD option, as just the 40GB file on one of my partition would be dedicated, all the rest of the HDD would be 'untouched'.

My laptop has a striped array of SSDs and the disk type is dynamic. It had some partitions. I set aside a partition, formatted it and tried to install the consumer preview on the real partition not a vhd. This installed but could not boot at all. Next, I just upgraded my laptop's Win7 to Win8 consumer preview on the C drive and it's been working perfectly till now.

It kept all my old windows files in a folder called Windows. Would the RTM version support installing to a partition on a dynamic disk? While I'm happy to use the consumer preview as my main machine, I can think of many scenarios where I would want to install to a separate partition or vhd. Wonderer just reading here that Windows 8 consumer preview runs IIS8.

March 05, Does this still update the Bootloader to the spiffy Win8 version or can we use it with the Win7 bootloader? Scott Koon. These steps worked extremely well for me too. I also forgot to write down the key from the downloads page, but luckily my Windows Phone came to the rescue!

I didn't know about [locate] but will keep that in mind for the future. Thanks Scott! Mark A. Great tutorial! I have a couple of questions: 1. If I delete the VHD, will this screw up my boot menu? Has anyone used this method to install Win8 on a Mac? I am trying to triple boot but I am unable to since the MBR is limited to 4 primary partitions.

Will using a VHD get around this and solve my issue? Thank in advance! March 06, March 09, I'm going for it. Will see you on the other side. No Fear. March 12, Brad Kingsley. March 13, Magic, the install completed. March 31, Scott, thanks for this. Really like learning about backing up the Boot Manager Database.