Cutting down winXP without uninstall?

Audigex

Audigex

Audigex

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3 Feb 2009
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Hey, I've just borked my laptop with a glass of orange juice, so I'm currently 50 miles away from my PC with no transport to go get it and an Eee PC to finish my uni coursework and revision on.

My Eee happens to be a 12GB SSD version (4+8) and my C drive is just about full.

Essentially windows takes up most of it, along with the JDK (can't remove this). I've moved just about everything (firefox, 7zip etc) over to my D drive, but it's not helped too much... I've done the standard uninstall things, remove windows components, delete tmep files.... Other than those, what sort of things can I safely delete? Any folders under windows other than the temp stuff? Any language files hidden away I don't need?

Any other likely targets? Application data that will rebuild when I next use the program etc?

C:\Windows\Help seems a likely suspect? 40mb or so I can smite from there. Any problems with this?

Edit: Okay, it seems to be alive again after that impromptu watercooling session - however I'd still like to cut down my eee XP install as those "You are running out of disk space" warnings are getting irritating.
:-)
 
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Go to ‘ HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer ‘ on the left pane of the Registry Editor. Create a new key (DWORD Value) in the right pane with the following details: NoLowDiskSpaceChecks and give it a value of 1. This will remove the balloon messages!

Also, try something like WinDirStat to see a visual representation of whats eating your drivespace.

Disabling and removing remnants of system restore is a place to start if you can back up in other ways. To manually backup your registry, check out ERUNT.

If you really want to go to work streamlining XP then XPlite is the place to start, though its payware.

;)
 
Disable hibernation.
I don't suppose your Eee has sufficient RAM to be able to disable the pagefile? :p You can get away with 2GB RAM and pagefile disabled with XP if you don't do anything too demanding on it. But you might be able to reduce it a bit, unless it's already had to increase its size then try cutting it down to a 1:1 ratio with your RAM, or more if you're feeling adventurous.
Other than that, TreeSize Pro (the trial/free version) is what I use to assess disk space and decide what to delete. Again, visual representation of disk usage (pie chart) is produced for the whole drive, and then for subfolders if you dig a little deeper.
And try hunting for language files..
 
Ratbag, thanks for the tip on getting rid of the balloon - although I think I need to get at the underlying problem too xD

I'm tempted to use nLite, but it means the hassle of installing over USB DVD drive and I don't have an enclosure.

I basically know where the space is being eaten, but I don't want to delete much in the windows or application data folders, as I don't know what's necessary.

Minivazz, hibernation is disabled and the Eee only has a gig of ram ATM (not got round to upgrading).

I've already deleted quite a lot of language files, but I'll certainly go hunting for more.

Bledd, system restore is also disabled - I'd forgotten about ccleaner, so cheers for that :)

Any specifics on areas within the windows folder that I can take out? I'm sure there must be plenty of redundante crap on there...
 
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