Win7 disk utilization

[eccerr0r]

How much space are you guys win7 c:\windows directory using?
I have a 40G partition for it for emergency use - but it's totally full, 19GB there. 15GB in hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys, and the partition is filled to the gills... why?

[kaboom]

Re: Win7 disk utilization

Is that "40G" really a separate partition, or the size of an HDD?
HDDs go by base-10; a "40G" HDD is really around 37GB.

W7 has that boot/recovery partition too, a few hundred megs.


Kill hibernate and the swapfile (really? in 2019?).

Set virtual memory usage to zero/custom, just like in 95/98/2k/XP.

To kill hibernation, open an admin-level command prompt, and type:

"powercfg -hibernate off"

& hit enter.

Reboot. If swap or hibernate files remain, delete manually. Should defrag afterwards too, those large files are/were a significant portion of total space.

10-12GB, before programs are installed, should be possible for W7.

[ChaosLegionnaire]

Re: Win7 disk utilization

yes i recall there is something like that done for win7 and later, maybe even vista too. that is when u reboot or shut the computer down, it doesnt actually shut down. it just dumps the memory to the hard drive in hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys so windows can quickly start up again. i think there is an option to disable this buried somewhere in control panel or somewhere tho im not sure where it is exactly.

[Curious.George]

Re: Win7 disk utilization

How much space are you guys win7 c:\windows directory using?
I have a 40G partition for it for emergency use - but it's totally full, 19GB there. 15GB in hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys, and the partition is filled to the gills... why?

15G in \Windows.

Hiberfil is used to store the state of the machine when it sleeps -- the more RAM you have, the bigger that will end up. Disable hibernation to rid yourself of it (and pay the price of always having the machine "on", or, longer boot times when your alternative is to power it off, completely.

Pagefile acts like the swap partition:

"Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\System"

"Advanced system settings"

"Settings..." (under "Performance")

"Advanced" tab

"Virtual Memory"

You can also remove (usually superfluous) "Restore Points":

"Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\System"

"System Protection"

"Configure..."

"Delete" tab

[Curious.George]

Re: Win7 disk utilization

Kill... the swapfile (really? in 2019?).

Set virtual memory usage to zero/custom, just like in 95/98/2k/XP.

That depends on how much physical RAM you have in the machine, the apps you typically run and the number of concurrent "users" you have logged in. The pagefile is effectively "slow (and inexpensive) RAM".

E.g., this 8GB machine typically runs with 65+% memory utilization. Pagefile gives us cheap insurance against kernel panics (or, worse -- "dubious" application faults)!

[eccerr0r]

Re: Win7 disk utilization

I probably should have made it clearer: the objective is not clearing space per se, but rather making c:\windows go on a diet -- how much should be in this directory and how much is fluff?

Maybe I should have just wrote I have a 25GB partition and 19GB is used by windows and I have neither pagefile.sys nor hiberfil.sys, but would like to somehow suspend to disk? (oh no, I have no applications installed... j/k)

[Curious.George]

Re: Win7 disk utilization

I probably should have made it clearer: the objective is not clearing space per se, but rather making c:\windows go on a diet -- how much should be in this directory and how much is fluff?

Maybe I should have just wrote I have a 25GB partition and 19GB is used by windows and I have neither pagefile.sys nor hiberfil.sys, but would like to somehow suspend to disk? (oh no, I have no applications installed... j/k)

IIRC, all of the restore points are stored under "System Volume Information". It's likely you have a few GB of those that are probably expendable (esp if your system is running "stable").

I don't believe it is possible to move hiberfil.sys as the OS wants to find it in a "convenient" location (imagine if you could move it to a CIFS share... how would the system FIND it without all that software being "up and running" at boot time) when the system exists with only minimalist capability. Just like NTLDR, etc.

Powercfg –h –size %75

will reduce the size of the file (though there is a minimum below which things stop working).

I think you can move WINDOWS to another volume, though. So, let your boot disk be spinning rust (or a tiny SSD) and let it hold hiberfil.sys. Then, put your "used files" on a SSD mounted as D: with WINDOWS located there.

You can also selectively delete "core apps" (e.g., notepad) from the WINDOWS hierarchy -- though that's not likely to save you much.

A search through the registry for pathnames that contain "\Windows" might provide clues as to other things that can be moved (with those registry entries tweeked accordingly).

Consider that you can run W7 on a "diskless" workstation with really tiny SSDs (< 16G... maybe even 4G).

[Per Hansson]

Re: Win7 disk utilization

You can run disk cleanup selecting the option "Windows Update Cleanup"
I have a HTPC with a 40GB SSD, that gets this treatment sometimes.
It has around 5GB memory free now.
My main machine that I never have run that on has a Windows directory size of 32GB and claims I would save 13GB with it.
However that size itself is a misrepresentation, there is a KB article from Microsoft that describes it linked below:

https://support.microsoft.com/sv-se/...rge-windows-co

[eccerr0r]

Re: Win7 disk utilization

That's the trouble I guess... I've been trying to run disk cleanup and it simply wouldn't get me below about that 19GB mark. I dream of 5GB free on that 40G partition ... without deleting or resizing the swapfile and hiberfil.

I really don't have any applications in Windows, but somehow is using so much space used up, doesn't make any sense. Speaking of which I have another machine with a 16GB SSD with win8.1 on it with its default applications it with a bit less than 1GB to spare... so certainly Win7 should be smaller than this...

Also perhaps the fact it's 64-bit Windows7, versus 32-bit Windows8.1... which may make a difference with Windows on Windows crap...perhaps this is why it's so huge?

10GB for the base Win7 OS install with no apps sounds reasonable...sort of... I have a Linux install with applications in 10GB (though not on this machine.)

[delaware74b]

Re: Win7 disk utilization

Out of curiosity, I looked at my laptop's windows folder and it's at 8.6GB. Windoze10 on Acer Aspire E5 series, 6GB RAM, Samsung 850 EVO 256GB SSD, Core i5-4210U 1.7ghz. Only a 200mb page file?!

[eccerr0r]

Re: Win7 disk utilization

I don't know about how win10 fits into this due to its interdependence with the network. I recall the win10 install being only one dvd, but win7 is clearly multiple dvds or at least that's my OS backup disk set...

[Curious.George]

Re: Win7 disk utilization

I don't know about how win10 fits into this due to its interdependence with the network. I recall the win10 install being only one dvd, but win7 is clearly multiple dvds or at least that's my OS backup disk set...

Win7 x64 is a single DVD9.

[Stefan Payne]

Re: Win7 disk utilization

I don't know about how win10 fits into this due to its interdependence with the network. I recall the win10 install being only one dvd, but win7 is clearly multiple dvds or at least that's my OS backup disk set...

Get an Original DVD File from Microsoft. You can download it somewhere (or at least you could), need a valid key though. And make a fresh install.

Anyway, something happened with the NT6 kernel and the stuff based on that that caused the size of Windows to explode.
For Windows NT5 based OS I had like 4GiB Partitions.

Anyway, my Windows is 18,8 GiB, 12 on Disk for my Surfin Installation.
21,1GiB with 14,4GiB on Disk.

You might be able to compress some folders and later Windows Versions (10) seem to do that theirselves...

Win7 x64 is a single DVD9.

Öhm, no. It should be a DVD4,7.
The Image is just above 3GiB for the 64bit Version, the 32bit version is, according to WinFuture, just 2,3GiB large.

[Curious.George]

Re: Win7 disk utilization

Win7 x64 is a single DVD9.

Öhm, no. It should be a DVD4,7.
The Image is just above 3GiB for the 64bit Version, the 32bit version is, according to WinFuture, just 2,3GiB large.

In most cases, you'll need DRIVERS for your machine -- some of which may be essential if you want/need that machine to go online (e.g., to activate a retail license, fetch drivers, fetch updates).

And, you'll also need to install updates (unless you want to be exposed, on-line, WHILE you fetch those drivers and updates).

My Z800 "install disk" has the 4.23GB of OEM "HP" ISO (despite the fact that there is no HP cruft installed on any of my machines).

Then, ~250MB of "essential" drivers -- not counting the bloated driver for the add-in Quadro 6000 (network driver alone is a 180MB package).

And, I've managed to pare down the updates to just 990MB by carefully studying the relationships between each update release since SP1.

[My machines are airgapped so I can ignore almost all of the MS updates -- as well as not needing an AV product -- which would ALSO want to be available soon after building any machine that will be on-line!]

Of course, you could opt for a small DVD with JUST the Windows install image stuff on it...

And another with the drivers for JUST the x64 version of your machine... (the full set of drivers for all supported versions of the Z800 occupy five DVD5's).

And other(s) for the updates... (assume you don't keep any of the documentation for all of these files)

But, then you're back to "several disks"!

And, you've still got nothing beyond MS's software to do anything! (e.g., no AV product)

A single DVD9 makes life a lot easier -- esp if you're supporting multiple instances of the same machine hardware!

[Curious.George]

Re: Win7 disk utilization

Out of curiosity, I looked at my laptop's windows folder and it's at 8.6GB. Windoze10 on Acer Aspire E5 series, 6GB RAM, Samsung 850 EVO 256GB SSD, Core i5-4210U 1.7ghz. Only a 200mb page file?!

Looking at my notes for an earlier Z800 build, disk utilization just after installing W7SP1 was 99GB. Of that, 50GB was the pagefile (48GB RAM in that machine, at that time) and 37GB for the hibernation file. So, I assume the windows installation was ~12GB (for \WINDOWS as well as any cruft installed in \Program Files, etc.)

After installing drivers and the slimmest set of updates that I deemed necessary, and purging all restore points, utilization was 104.6GB. So, I assume the smallest "base system" (for that hardware) was ~17GB, before adding apps.

[Note, also, that if you choose to unpack any "additional programs" (games, IIS, etc.), more space on the drive will be consumed as you'll have the packed AND unpacked versions of those in place!]

[Topcat]

Re: Win7 disk utilization

On my office machine (my most heavily used system), the \windows directory is 16.9gb. The root of C: is 111gb; hiberfil.sys is 47.9gb and the pagefile is 63.9gb. I'm not in a pinch for drive space, so I didn't bother disabling hibernation.

[eccerr0r]

Re: Win7 disk utilization

So it sounds like 19GB is a little on the high side even after getting all those patches online though not extreme. It started as original win7-64 and took on SP1 with all the patches that have come out and whatnot. Don't know how much M$ keeps around after upgrading, but this is the original OEM Win7 that came with the machine.

I think I ran the installer on less than 5 programs total -- I don't use windows for much at all, it basically sits there. Though this does not count any installed applications that came with the OEM install.

Now the question is what I can trim... Disk cleanup does squat. Grr.

BTW this 19GB is 19GB reported from Linux/coreutils "du" - not 19GiB, and includes any hidden files in this directory if there are any that ntfs3g finds...

[Curious.George]

Re: Win7 disk utilization

I think I ran the installer on less than 5 programs total -- I don't use windows for much at all, it basically sits there. Though this does not count any installed applications that came with the OEM install.

You can use Control Panel | Uninstall Programs to see what Windows thinks you have added to the distribution -- along with what it thinks those items "cost", in terms of space. Many apps are actually pretty bloated (when you look at all of their dependencies).

Now the question is what I can trim... Disk cleanup does squat. Grr.

The page and hibernation stores are the only known "biggies" that you can salvage. Note that you can set the pagefile to "0" and just live with the consequences of running out of physical RAM. The hibernation file can be discarded if you want to live without that "suspend to disk" capability.

You can have the OS search \Windows (or any other place) for "Large" or even "Huge" files in the hopes of stumbling upon a cherry. But, for the most part, you'll have to poke around folders to see what you really can live without.

E.g., do you really need Themes? A supply of Wallpaper? Gadgets?

[bewinco]

Re: Win7 disk utilization

60G is enough if you don't put personal staff in it. For Windows 10, at least 100G as it pushes updates regularly.