Windows 7: Trimming fat off Win7

This OS - though pretty good - is a HUGE space hog (over 21gB).

Any solutions - or links to threads that cover - to trimming Windows 7 down some? Like deleting unnecessary files and such?

In the past variations that was always an option. Now it seems it isn't.

Hmmm, I only see 11GB occupied by the OS, IE9 and a few other things. I wonder where the differences are?

Sorry, I don't know much about trimming this OS - I was just shocked to see that 21GB size in your post.

Turn off the hibernate option.

You could use Disk Cleanup:

Disk Cleanup - Open and Use

WinSXS could one of the main ones. My windows is 17gb, but it was only installed a month ago, over time it will grow. My WinSXS is 6gb of that.

You can uninstall other stuff through control panel, programs and features, turn windows featrures on or off.

There is some useful information over at Black Viper's Website is you want to tune it a bit more.

You could also consider shrinking your swap file if you have lots of ram and you don't hit it very often, but I'd do some research with that first. Or you could move it to another drive/partition.

You could also reduce the space used by system restore if you have that turned on. On large drives this can eat up as much as 10gb over a few weeks/months. If you drop it's percentage down you can keep fewer restore points and save space.

Fewer restore points could compromise your recoverability though..

good luck

Thanks for the info. I've noticed (but not tracked) the growth of the WinSXS area. It is not a problem for me since I only have Windows 7 in a frozen Virtual Machine. I'm familiar with Black Viper's site (and others) as they apply to XP since I have several trimmed down XP VMs. I've not taken the time to dig into cleaning Windows 7 VMs. One good thing about VMs: the system restore point function is off :-)

There has to be a bunch of youngin's on these boards, because I can't imagine any other reason why so many people would still be recommending QuackViper's site. I'll develop arthritis typing in the reasons one more time....so let's just say avoid that site completely. I can't stress that enough.

As for "trimming the fat", before you take any steps, you need to find out what is using up the space you feel is "fat". WinDirStat will tell you this. Once you find that out, then you'll know how to proceed. Until then, we can only make random guesses.

As stated disabling hibernation helps a lot, Windows creates a hiberfil two times the size of installed RAM. It will also make a large Page File too and you can adjust that to a smaller size.
My full clean Ultimate 64 bit install, no programs, was 11.9 GB. The x64 version takes more space too.

EDIT:

Microsoft recommend at least 20 GB for the 64-bit version of Windows 7 so I don't see that you've got too much of a problem really.

That said, Disk Cleanup, turning off Hibernation and deleting Windows.old (if you have it) will reclaim a fair bit of hard drive space.

You didn't give us your specs so we don't know how big your hard drive is, but say for argument's sake, it comes out at 500 GB, less than 5% allocated to the operating system is pretty good I would have thought.

About WinSXS... That is in fact the the OS. All of the core system files are stored there. That's where the actual DLLs and everything live which is why it's so big. And the 64 bit version is larger as it needs to have both 64 and 32 bit versions of a LOT of the files :/