Windows 7: New Win7 Installation Too large

I just installed Windows 7 Ultimate on a new build. The OS is installed on a 128GB Samsung 840 Pro. I haven't installed any drivers or programs yet I'm showing only 56.0GB free out of 119GB. What's eating up all the space?

Hello Lady F,

Was this a clean install or an upgrade install?

If upgrade, you may have the Windows.old folder taking up a large chunk of space that can be deleted.

Windows.old Folder - Delete

Next, starting at OPTION ONE in the tutorial below with WinDirStat, this may help ID what is using up the HDD space for now.

Hard Disk Space - Free Up and Recover

Please go ahead and post back with a screenshot showing the full layout of your Disk Management window to see if something may be off with the partitions/volumes.

Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image

Hope this helps for now.

It's a new build so it's a new installation. Nothing had been put on the SSD prior to the installation.

Ok, so far so good. Be sure to check all items in the tutorial above to see if any may be the hog.

Let's go ahead and see that screenshot if you like to see if you may have some "unallocated" space floating around on the hard drive not in use.

Did you Turn off Hibernation off

Open elevated Command Prompt and type in this command to turn it off

Disabled System Protection


Open the Start Menu
Right click Computer
Click Properties
Click System protection (it's on the left side)
Select C:
Click the Configure button
Click "Turn off system protection" or adjust slider to desired size.

Turn off indexing

Open the Start Menu
Click Computer
Right click C: drive > properties and uncheck drive indexing
Click apply (ignore all when comes up)
Once done press the start button and type "Indexing options" into the search and enter, a window will pop up and you can adjust Indexing for quick search exactly how you like.

Disable Disk Defrag

To check if TRIM is enabled

Click on , in the search bar type “cmd”. The cmd program should show at the top of the window under programs (1). Right-click on “cmd” and click on “run as administrator”. Type the following string: “fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify” and hit <ENTER>.



For better performance

1. Hit the Winkey + ‘R’ to get you to the ‘Run’ menu.

2. Type ‘Regedit’.

3. Select the file path:

4. Right Click and modify Start from 3 to 0 and Restart. Change BIOS SATA configuration to AHCI

Post the screen shot of disk management.

@ VistaKing. You may have hit the head on the nail (or something like that); I've only got a miniscule 32GB of RAM. It's late and my eyes are crossing so I'm hitting the rack (poor rack). I printed out all of your directions and I will check things out tomorrow.

When set to System Managed the Paging File will make itself the same size as the RAM. Our SSD expert Wolfgang recommends in such a case setting Paging File size to 2gb to save space without any performance problem since it will rarely be referenced anyway with that much RAM. Change Virtual Memory Paging File

I would not personally want to turn off Hibernation or Indexing since these modern features are perfected in Windows 7 and I rely upon them. But if you don't that can be another option.

I would also install WinDirStat and study it's drive map.

We have a winner. The paging file was the culprit. The not so little bugger was hogging 32.7GB of space! I pared it down to 800MB and I'm now using only 33.4GB (including some drivers I've added).

I'm keeping hibernation for now. I may need it for unattended shutdown by my UPS to avoid losing any work in progress. I won't know for sure until I set it up and test it.

Haven't done it yet but I'm going to disable system protection. I haven't had much luck with system restore and would prefer to rely on frequent imaging since I do that anyway using Macrium Reflect.

I would prefer to keep drive indexing. It comes in handy when I lose a file (ADHD and old age suck) or can't remember how to get to a certain function.

I already had defrag shut off.

I checked and TRIM is enabled.

I enabled ACHI before installing the OS.

Once I install all of my programs, since I should still have more than enough headroom I may consider increasing the amount of overprovisioning (then again, I may not).

I've tried WinDirStat and couldn't make any sense of it. Being color blind doesn't help any.

Thanks for your help, you all!

If you would like you could do the command below. That will shrink your hibernation size not turn it completely off.