State of your OS drive

Guest2

Guest2

Guest2

Soldato
Joined
6 May 2009
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I have some general questions/info to fill in about the state of your operating system drive. Mine hasnt been formatted in years and am thinking about giving it a format and re-install. It runs fine at the moment but im sure there's a load of stuff thats not needed

I use Acronis True image to clone the drive to another and keep that incase I get a virus or something

Programs in system tray are - Xonar essence ST audio centre, NOD32 antivirus, internet access

Raxco Perfect disk is running 'stealth' mode all the time. Windows 7 pro 64bit

Drive - Velociraptor 150GB
Backup drive - Maxtor 160GB
Used Space - 83GB
Processes on startup - 68!?

Size of Windows folder - 21GB
Size of Users folder - 9GB
Size of program files, program files (x86) and program data - 7.8GB
 
The problem is a few stats don't really tell you much about the state of the OS. Your Windows folder sounds about average, and your Users and Program Files folders could have 9GB and 7.8GB of crap in them or 9GB and 7.8GB of stuff you actually need.

It's the same with the processes. The best thing to do would be to go into Services and turn off/stop from starting anything you don't need. And by this I don't mean turn off Windows services, I mean stuff like Bonjour and other crap you never use.
 
XP - Original Install Date: 15/08/2009 :cool:

200 GB partition on a 1 TB drive for C:

Documents and Settings: 10.9 GB (7.40 GB folder on my desktop)
Program Files: 24.6 GB
Windows: 6.46 GB
 
theheyes said:
The problem is a few stats don't really tell you much about the state of the OS. Your Windows folder sounds about average, and your Users and Program Files folders could have 9GB and 7.8GB of crap in them or 9GB and 7.8GB of stuff you actually need.

It's the same with the processes. The best thing to do would be to go into Services and turn off/stop from starting anything you don't need. And by this I don't mean turn off Windows services, I mean stuff like Bonjour and other crap you never use.
Click to expand...

Yup that's basically it. You can't put a figure on the state of an OS.

My documents and media are on individual drives but my system tray for example has 14 icons, 4 of which are Windows required icons but the rest are STEAM, SpeedFan, CoreTemp etc, stuff that is required but doesn't really affect the system performance in any way.

My Win7 Pro x64 was installed on 21/08/2009 (cmd = systeminfo) and has been perfectly fine to date. I do run a tight ship though of thorough maintenance on a weekly basis and have said before than it's probably in a better state than most new install states after a month going by how a lot of people run their systems...

For the record though, Windows directory is 20.2GB.
 
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I reformatted not too long ago, due to motherboard change. But I usually end up formatting at least twice a year as I like a fresh OS. I keep everything clean tho, no junk files/programs etc.
 
I installed Win7/64 in Jenuary this year. Thats the longest I have EVER had any version of Windows on any PC.

My Sabayon Linux PC started life with 3.5 and was 5.5 when it finally fell over, however it fell over the exact same way that all Linux distros seem to have doen to me recently and thats remove the title bar on Windows when I want to use compiz.

The longest install ever is my Magic 6 & Jinnee Desktop on my Atari TT and thats been used pretty much every day since its last install of 1994.

Woot for the retro!

Back onto Windows however, I only have the very basics on my C: drive and it is a little rough in the My Documents folders, but other than that it seems to be fine...

Users - 14.7GB / 17,908 Files ( Ouch )
Windows - 19.0GB / 85,063 Files
ProgFiles - 4.13GB / 11,389 Files - This is the 32 and 64 Bit Progfiles folders, plus the program data folder.

I have been twiddling about with themes so teh windows folder can shrink a fair cunk, and I can easily get rid of pretty much everythign in my Docs folders because tere is a lot of junk like Music that I can chucked to/from my phone, plus my Desktop has a couple of movies that I was in the middle of converting, so... ( Yes, home movies... nothing shady )
 
Not sure why everyone has such large Windows folders, mine is this big.

clipboard01jt.png
 
Broken Hope said:
Not sure why everyone has such large Windows folders, mine is this big.

clipboard01jt.png
Click to expand...

How long has it been installed, have you installed all updates? It saves updates so things can be rolled back in the Winsxs folder...

winsxs folder in Windows - ~46000 files, 8.6gb

I formatted and reinstalled all programs, the Windows folder was then 10.5gb, 61695 files

However I have cloned back from my old drive because NOD32 wouldnt work properly, I forgot how to get zero configuration working with wireless and a few other annoying things. (firefox tabs lost, new mozilla looks crap...)

If its not broken, dont try fixing it!

edit - If I delete everything in the winsxs folder, would it break Windows 7? (Ive alway got a cloned drive for backup anyway)
edit2 - Been reading and there is a lot of info on that folder here. Maybe I wont delete it all (yet)
http://social.technet.microsoft.com...p/thread/9411dbaa-69ac-43a1-8915-749670cec8c3
 
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Guest2 said:
How long has it been installed, have you installed all updates? It saves updates so things can be rolled back in the Winsxs folder...

winsxs folder in Windows - ~46000 files, 8.6gb

I formatted and reinstalled all programs, the Windows folder was then 10.5gb, 61695 files

However I have cloned back from my old drive because NOD32 wouldnt work properly, I forgot how to get zero configuration working with wireless and a few other annoying things. (firefox tabs lost, new mozilla looks crap...)

If its not broken, dont try fixing it!

edit - If I delete everything in the winsxs folder, would it break Windows 7? (Ive alway got a cloned drive for backup anyway)
edit2 - Been reading and there is a lot of info on that folder here. Maybe I wont delete it all (yet)
http://social.technet.microsoft.com...p/thread/9411dbaa-69ac-43a1-8915-749670cec8c3
Click to expand...

Install date was 5th of May 2010 according to systeminfo. I have all updates installed as well as SP1. I wouldn't delete anything in your winsxs folder if you actually want your system to boot again.
 
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