[BLOG] Need to get your Vista install trimmed down a bit?
Let's face it. Vista is not a light-weight operating system - but it doesn't have to be such a pig.
If you are like most out there, you have a fairly large conventional hard drive with hundreds of gigabytes to spare and probably don't care much to investigate if a few of those plentiful gigabytes go missing.
Having read a handful of solid state drive reviews, I was convinced that this technology was ready for prime time and was something I wanted to invest in. Prices had come down quite a bit - arguably to affordable levels - but capacity was nowhere near that of mechanical hard drives. Since solid state drive prices are very linear as capacity increases, it was important for me to find out just how much space I needed. A quick look at my operating system partition revealed that I had 155GB used out of my 640GB available. I was pretty shocked considering that I only had about four games installed, Microsoft Office and some other smaller applications. Could Vista really be this bloated? I recalled installing XP and Vista on small 40GB operating system partitions many times before, so something must be afoot. Since 120GB was really the only "reasonably" affordable SSD capacity on the market, I was almost ready to give up on the idea.
Digging through my folder structure to find the source of the bloat led me to the "System Volume Information" folder. After a few google searches, I was able to determine that Vista had created dozens and dozens of multi-gigabyte system restore points. Likely during regular windows update operations and application installations. When you consider just how frequently updates come down from Microsoft, disk space can start to disappear at a fair quick pace. Being the hardcore, bleeding edge computer enthusiast that I am, I didn't hesitate to disable system restore. The result? Over 100GB released. Wow.
But I wasn't satisfied yet. I continued to dig, and discovered that a huge archive of old DLL files and other system files could be found buried in the WinSxS folder. There was not just a huge quantity of files, but numerous versions of each. After a bit of research, I discovered that that Vista archives all updated files in this location from service pack updates as well as other windows updates. So that means I've got archived system files dating back to pre-SP1 installation.
Do I ever plan to uninstall Vista SP2? Fat chance. Do I plan to subsequently remove SP1? Yeah right.
To make SP2 permanent, simply launch a command prompt window as an administrator and run compcln.exe. After a bit of disk drive crunching, you'll reclaim at least a few gigabytes of space. I didn't check the exact amount, but it was somewhere in the order of 3-4GB for me. This may be insignificant to a mechanical hard drive owner, but to an SSD owner, this could be of paramount importance.
So after just a bit of effort, I was able to knock my Vista install down from 155GB to a much more reasonable 42GB. Not too shabby!
Enjoy your reclaimed ones and zeros!
If you are like most out there, you have a fairly large conventional hard drive with hundreds of gigabytes to spare and probably don't care much to investigate if a few of those plentiful gigabytes go missing.
Having read a handful of solid state drive reviews, I was convinced that this technology was ready for prime time and was something I wanted to invest in. Prices had come down quite a bit - arguably to affordable levels - but capacity was nowhere near that of mechanical hard drives. Since solid state drive prices are very linear as capacity increases, it was important for me to find out just how much space I needed. A quick look at my operating system partition revealed that I had 155GB used out of my 640GB available. I was pretty shocked considering that I only had about four games installed, Microsoft Office and some other smaller applications. Could Vista really be this bloated? I recalled installing XP and Vista on small 40GB operating system partitions many times before, so something must be afoot. Since 120GB was really the only "reasonably" affordable SSD capacity on the market, I was almost ready to give up on the idea.
Digging through my folder structure to find the source of the bloat led me to the "System Volume Information" folder. After a few google searches, I was able to determine that Vista had created dozens and dozens of multi-gigabyte system restore points. Likely during regular windows update operations and application installations. When you consider just how frequently updates come down from Microsoft, disk space can start to disappear at a fair quick pace. Being the hardcore, bleeding edge computer enthusiast that I am, I didn't hesitate to disable system restore. The result? Over 100GB released. Wow.
But I wasn't satisfied yet. I continued to dig, and discovered that a huge archive of old DLL files and other system files could be found buried in the WinSxS folder. There was not just a huge quantity of files, but numerous versions of each. After a bit of research, I discovered that that Vista archives all updated files in this location from service pack updates as well as other windows updates. So that means I've got archived system files dating back to pre-SP1 installation.
Do I ever plan to uninstall Vista SP2? Fat chance. Do I plan to subsequently remove SP1? Yeah right.
To make SP2 permanent, simply launch a command prompt window as an administrator and run compcln.exe. After a bit of disk drive crunching, you'll reclaim at least a few gigabytes of space. I didn't check the exact amount, but it was somewhere in the order of 3-4GB for me. This may be insignificant to a mechanical hard drive owner, but to an SSD owner, this could be of paramount importance.
So after just a bit of effort, I was able to knock my Vista install down from 155GB to a much more reasonable 42GB. Not too shabby!
Enjoy your reclaimed ones and zeros!
0
Comments
It's also wise to run disk cleanup to remove unnecessary files