Trimming fat off Win7

Just curious. What type of install do you have on your SSD? The reason I ask is, I have 2 different machines each running the same Intel 120 GB SSD. On one, I did a clean install. The other one has a factory (Toshiba) install. The one that has the clean install has way more free space than the one with the factory install. I imagine it's because of how the Toshiba install does it's partitioning.

The Toshiba install has 3 partitions; a recovery partition, the actual Windows OS (with boot, page file, crash dump) and another healthy partition. The recovery partition is where all the space is used up.

On the machine with the clean install, there is no recovery partition. Lot less space is used for the actual OS.

Anyhow, just a stab in the dark.

don't 'clean' anything else in the winsxs (windows side-by-side) folder. it contains mostly hard links to files located elsewhere. the way windows7 works, they are effectively counted twice for the folder space, thus misreporting it. the hard linked files are NOT really taking up any more space. if you start approaching the actuall size of the hard drive, you can get an anomaly where you appear to have used more space than your drive size, while still having free space. MS needs to fix that and make it more clear why you should NOT fool with winsxs stuff. for compatibility, win7 keeps copies of shared versions of files for apps, one app may need v1.1 of a certain .dll, another might need v1.2 where the first cannot use 1.2. another app may work with v1.1 & gets a hard link instead of a seperate copy of the dll. if you delete things in the winsxs you can thereafter expect compatibility issues and are not really gaining any space. it's kinda hard to explain, so you might be able to get a better explanation elsewhere, but take my word for it, DO NOT MESS WITH WINSXS, you'll be sorry.ifr you mess it up, a win7 repair install will not fix it. you will need a win7 repair install, plus a reinstall of every piece of software you ever installed, all updates for windows, all updates for the software. the only other option is restore from a backup image if you are lucky enough to have a current one.

IE8 cannot be uninstalled, just hidden in Features.

Look over these steps to Clean Reinstall Windows 7 Factory OEM which work quite well with Toshiba.

An interim step which can greatly improve performance is to Clean up factory bloatware

The webcam will always work with the actual applications you cam on (MSN, Yahoo, etc) but for the full features you need the software package which should be on the Toshiba Support Downloads webpage for your model, under Drivers. You can also google your Toshiba model + name of webcam to see how webcam or any other apps work for others after a clean reinstall.