Vista hard drive space

dannyjo22 · 11 May 2010 at 20:15

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?

brummie · 11 May 2010 at 20:17

system protection & page file?

Ratbag · 11 May 2010 at 20:53

Probably the winsxs folder...

SiriusB · 11 May 2010 at 21:08

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.

Aod · 12 May 2010 at 03:08

SiriusB said:
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.

or you could use SequoiaView which is faster and came first

ajstan · 12 May 2010 at 09:57

I had this exact problem and it turned out to be Lenovo backups somehow hidden on my PC, I didn't even know it was doing it

Skim through my thread first, might save you some time: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18109749

dannyjo22 · 12 May 2010 at 13:42

Thanks for the suggestions I will try them when i get home. I will do the scan and post the results up if I'm still confused

feriso · 12 May 2010 at 22:54

Currently got an issue with this with my sxs folder taking 6.5GB on my 19Gb drive :mad:

Is there anyway to reduce it/eliminate it

Broken Hope · 15 May 2010 at 09:47

feriso said:
Currently got an issue with this with my sxs folder taking 6.5GB on my 19Gb drive

Is there anyway to reduce it/eliminate it

It's not actually taking up 6.5GB, Windows can't display the size of it properly due to the fact it contains hard links to other files.

feriso · 15 May 2010 at 09:54

But why does it count against my available HD space ?

Broken Hope · 15 May 2010 at 11:42

feriso said:
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

Yet my entire C drive shows as the following

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.

Amp34 · 15 May 2010 at 11:55

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

SiriusB · 15 May 2010 at 14:18

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.

Amp34 · 15 May 2010 at 14:28

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.