PATH's and ENVIRONMENT

flez · 08 Aug 2010

How can I stop win7 from growing all over drive C!

It starts out as a nice small install, add a few extras, then a month later 40gb is gone!

its mostly growing in the appdata folder and other temp area's its most annoying

I ask this as I am looking at using win7 on my latest CarPC install instead of XP, although I must admit i prefer XP as I was looking at using HORM and have a fast booting system (Hibernate Once Resume Many)(can 7 do that....)

So, can I set up the system with a drive C, and a drive D, and shuffle the paths/environment variables to make all the annoying stuff grow on D, that way when I back up drive C its not going to keep making my backups get bigger and bigger every week

I was also going to try a small homebrew SSD so cant afford to have it growing all the time

Petey7 · 08 Aug 2010

The short answer is yes, but I don't know how to do it, as I have never done it. If you want to just remove the "annoying things" the best idea is to use the disk cleanup utility to remove all old temp files, turn off the page file, and turn off system restore. This will free up space on your main drive, but just know that with out the page file turned on you will see more RAM usage, and without system restore some problems will be harder to fix.

Darician · 08 Aug 2010

To do this, you'll probably have to have your personal folder redirected to go to the D: Drive. I don't remember how to do it off the top of my head but it involves Group Policy to the best of my recollection. If someone else can remember, they'll probably post but I'll do some research tomorrow to refresh my memory as it has been a while since I've played with this setting.

Bare Foot Kid · 08 Aug 2010

Hello flez.

Most any programs/apps can be installed to a destination of your choosing at the initial install but can't be moved after; have a look at the 2 tutorials at the links below.

User Folders - Change Default Location

Optimize Windows 7