Windows 7 getting fat

Guys, I need some help here.
I have a partition only for the operational system. Now it's almost full, and I've just noticed that win 7 folder has 17gb! What's that about, temporary files? Is there any way to clean something that's consuming my harddrive in its folder?

Thanks.

holo88 said:

more than possible that your System Restore check points are the culprits. in disk clean up, hit "Clean up system files" (or similar) and then clean up restore points.

hope it helps.

I tried deleting these checkpoints but it didn't help. Windows folder still contains 17gb and increasing

Thanks

clean install again.

holo88 said:

hmm...

did you do an upgrade installation? if that is the case there will be a folder called windows.old. and that, depending on your previous OS, could account for the extra 8+ gigabytes.

I didn't, there's no windows.old folder. In my situation, I'd have deleted this already by now :P

Orbital Shark said:

It could be Updates (and backups of those) that are now taking up valuable space.

You may also want to check what is in C:\Windows\Temp folder and see if you can clear ALL that is in there.

This Temp folder contains 1.28gb... is it safe just to delete everything?
Sure this folder does contain quite large data, but it's not really the focus of the problem
winsxs folder has 5.61gb

7Dreams said:

clean install again.

That's something that I'm avoiding to do since I don't believe the only solution is reinstalling the OS.

Thanks to everyone.

You should know the Windows folder is shown as double in size then what it really is. This is because most of the files in there are nothing more then hardlinks to locations inside WinSxS. Hardlinks are counted in terms of filesize, every file that has a hardlink ref-point is counted twice or more.

In the screenshot below all the tiny red arrows in the bottom left corner are hardlinks. Enabled from "LinkShellExtension". Almost everything in System32 is a hardlink, only a few files are not.