Windows 7 folder is huge

16gb is a small Windows folder, mine is 23gb and I have User, temp and swap on the spinner. Another box with a fresh install of 7 shows 15.8gb.

Another tip is to disable hibernation. Open a command prompt as Admin, then type powercfg -h off .

> Mine is 20 GB, with all my apps. I don`t use a page file, and I don`t use system restore.
> Another tip is to disable hibernation. Open a command prompt as Admin, then type powercfg -h off .

All of the large system files are on other drives, swap, hiber, et cetera...

It looks like there are tons of OS, update and applications files...
Plus some good sized logs...

If it matters, the machine has 8GB of RAM, a 128 GB SSD, 1TB hard drive and an i5 CPU.

Having a 40 GB OS is mind boggling and loosing 24 GB of storage on the c: drive seems... wrong...

It is important t understand that the reported 16 GB in the Windows folder is actually larger than reality. This is largely due to the use of hard links. Hard links have been a part of the NTFS file system since Windows 2000 but weren't used in Windows until Vista. I won't go into the details but they allow one copy of a file to appear in multiple folders. This provides a number of important advantages, one being that it saves disk space. Windows determines the space used by a folder by going through each folder and adding up the sizes of each file. But when hard links are used that means a great deal of double counting. It is not that Windows is lying about the space used, it is that there are multiple truths, all different , and all equally valid. Determining the disk usage of a folder is actually very complex. Many arbitrary decisions must be made with no clear way to determine which is better.

Windows 7 is actually doing a great deal more than XP. It is just that much of this is not readily apparent to the user.

There are many trade offs in the design of complex software. Over the years due to changing technology the priorities have shifted. Many XP systems were installed on 20 GB hard disks and some even smaller. And that space had to be shared by all of the applications and data. Today most members of this forum would consider a 500 GB drive as rather small. This means that disk usage is less important and priorities can shift to other things.

My Windows folder was 22.5GB with over 100k files until I used Disk Cleanup a few minutes ago. First use of cleanup since re-installing everything a week ago with a new SSD. Big chunk was the Service Pack backup. Real "lean" now with less than 89k files.