Windows 7: Excessive disk usage

No offense taken. Without extensive measures, a base install of Windows 7 consumes more than 6GB of space.

As a test, I created a virtual machine and gave it a 30GB drive and 4GB of RAM. I installed Windows 7 Home Premium 32bit. Since it's only 32bit, it only saw 3GB of the RAM. My used space on C shows, 11,091,055,880 bytes, with free space of 21,014,228,992. My pagefile.sys is 3,145,208KB and my hiberfil.sys is 2,358,904KB.

My deleting my pagefile.sys and turning off hibernate and disabling System Restore...my drive is now at 5,470.011,392 bytes used and 26,635,284,280 bytes free.

So, you can get your starting point down to under 6GB...but that's without any windows updates, or anything else installed.




Now, on my actual Windows 7 64 bit Enterprise laptop that I use for work, my C:\windows folder according to Windows Explorer is 13.3GB in size.

The C:\windows\installer directory is 1.14GB and the C:\windows\winsxs folder "appears" to be 6.07GB. See this link to understand why I said "appears";
WinSXS Folder not actually consuming lots of space


And on my work desktop, running Windows 7 Enterprise 64bit, my C:\windows directory is 17.4GB, with C:\windows\installer coming in at 2.03GB and C:\windows\winsxs appearing to be 7.58GB.

I just reinstalled a couple of days ago. Right now it is pretty much a base install of Win 7 Ultimate x64. The only things I have installed is all updates and drivers. I have also installed Office 2007. Normally I move my swap file and temp folders to another drive but I have not done so yet. My C:\Windows dir is taking up 20GB right now. Remember, you can always use the "Disk Cleanup" app in Windows to clean up the extra junk that buils up over time and get a better idea of what windows is actually using.