Weight watchers for Windows: Saving space in XP/Vista
At first glance, today’s hard drives are quite large. But as hard drive grow, so do the ways to fill them. Remember when AOL fit on a single floppy? Programs are really huge these days, and many people have collections of videos and music than can easily eat away 100 or more gigabytes.
This one is for you Windows users who need a little extra space on your drive, but don’t want to sacrifice anything in the process.
(Oh, and, as always – proceed with caution, as with anything like this it’s your own risk)
First line of defense: Disk Cleanup Utility
Disk Cleanup Utility is a tool intended for PC novices. It’s designed to will help the user remove some unused files. It’s handy because it’s an all-in-once place to see how much room your Internet cache (temporary files) and so forth are taking up. You’ll also be able to flush out temp files, and junk setups left behind. This tool runs automatically if your drive starts to fill up, or you can launch it from Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup
The big one
This is something I do any time I install a fresh copy of windows. You can save literally gigabytes by doing this one, harmless, step. Right-click My Computer, choose Properties and click on the System Restore tab.
System Restore is a feature that will basically backup your system files so if something breaks your ability to startup, you have a fail-over. If you check the box to disable system restore, you get all that space back. (And it can be a gigabyte or even more.)
Of course, you may want the piece of mind that if something you install breaks Windows, you have a fall-back. My recommendation is find a backup program you like and backup to DVD or CD instead. Besides, System restore isn’t truly a backup. Broken programs are still broken, etc. If you need to boot up to undo a change you made to your system – well that’s what safe mode is for anyways. So to me, System Restore is a pointless waste of a LOT of space.
Swap it out
The Windows swap file is hard disk space that is used when programs need extra memory. For example, if you have 2gigs of memory installed and you are running 3 programs that each require 1 gig, swapping will occur and the extra 1 gig will be used on your hard drive. So your swap file can be pretty big.
Unless you have a LOT of memory (or a SSD drive) then turning swapping off completely isn’t exactly the best idea. Back in “the day” I used to used a fixed size swap file as this would keep the disk activity down from having to grow/shrink the swap file. This also helped prevent the disk from getting fragged. But now, that’s not really the issue. You can reduce your swap file size if you want the room, but that’s not really idea. To manage your swap file, right click My Computer, choose properties, click on the advanced tab, then under performance click Settings. Now, under the Advanced tab of this pop-up you should see some settings for your virtual memory / swap file. You’ll see how big your swap file is, perhaps 2gigs or such. If you click on change you get full control over how your swap behaves.
I’ve run into the situation before using virtual machines where I make a drive that is smallish, maybe 2 gigs – which of course Windows will fill up quickly. I could easily make a new drive that’s 20 gigs, but I don’t want to lose my stuff on my 2gig drive. So, what I’ve done here is create a second “helper” drive – a place to put stuff. I also put the swap file on this drive. So now, I’ve freed up several gigs on my primary drive, and the swap file has room to breathe. Most programs allow you to install in any location, it’s not insanely difficult to set a different location up as the Program Files directory.
Compression Method
Well this one I’ve been slow to warm up to – I have memories of Windows 95 disk-doubling which compressed everything and made everything slow. I’ve heard people use disk compression in XP and are completely fine, but normally I just compress some things that I know I won’t use. The Disk Cleanup utility can help you compress old and unused files.
As far as controlling disk compression, go into My Computer and right-click the hard drive you want to compress. Under the initial General tab, you should see a checkbox to enable disk compression. Compressed files from here on appear blue in explorer, and you shouldn’t notice much difference in accessing them. The only exception might be if you compress files needed by a game, etc.
More swap savings
The goal of this is to avoid having to re-install Windows, so here’s another idea of how to save some space. Remember earlier how I mentioned you could relocate your swap file to make space on your primary drive? Well some newer (cheaper) computers don’t provide you with re-install CDs. Dell/Compaq I’m looking at you. What they do usually now is make a “restore” partition – so if your Windows poops the bed, you can start from this partition and perform the restoration. Well what happens if your drive fails, that’s gone too, right? Well often you can call the manufacturer and request a CD. If you have a CD to reinstall Windows then there is no need for this restore partition and you can reclaim it for your stuff. Since we’re trying to avoid having to reinstall Windows you could simply format this partition and use it for your swap/temp files. Usually it’s only a gig or less, but it might be enough for this purpose.