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How I'm saving hard drive space
Now days, conserving hard drive space isn't too big of a deal. But I recently upgraded to a 30 gb OCZ Vertex SSD, so I'm a bit more conscious about how much space I'm using on my C: drive (which is the Vertex). Unfortunately it seems like Win 7 doesn't give you quite as many options for removing Windows components as XP did. Not that XP's options let you trim a lot of fat.
With 30 gb to play with, I want to put as much as practical on the SSD to take advantage of its speed. And I also want some free space because TRIM and garbage collection for SSDs needs space to move things around. So here is what I've done to keep things small. By the way, this is a desktop PC, not a notebook.
-Used vLite and removed the language packs, sample images and sounds, screensavers, and TV tuner drivers. Total savings: about 2 gigs.
-Disable hibernation and use sleep instead. Total savings: the size of your RAM (in my case 4 gb).
-Reduce pagefile size from 4 gb to a minimum of 512 and max of 1 gb. Total savings: The size of your RAM minus 500 mb. In my case, 3.5 gb. I know some people will claim to disable the pagefile entirely, but I'm erring on the side of caution.
So in my case, I have freed up 9.5 gigs with this alone.
After installing Office 2010 beta, I saw that the MSOCache folder was 650 mb. Some searching lead me to find out that this folder contained the install files for Office. They are needed when you update Office, so I ended up moving this to another drive (some registry editing was necessary and a symlink just in case something else tries to drop files in c:\MSOCache.)
So after all this, I've installed a good portion of my applications and I'm only using 10.4 gb. Included in this 10.4 gb are the following:
-Office 2010 without Outlook or OneNote
-Firefox with Flash, Java
-Thunderbird with all my email
-OpenOffice
-Visio
-Foxit Reader
-Macrium True Image (disk imaging for backups)
-Squeezebox Server
-Ccleaner
-MozBackup
-Win7 Firewall Control
-Microsoft Security Essentials (I'm trying it instead of AVG Free)
-System Restore is using 380 mb of a possible 1.2 gb
There are a few other little things installed that I'm not listing, and I still have more things to install. But as you can see, you can get Win 7 down to a manageable size, install quite a bit of essential stuff, and not take up a ton of room.
So that's what I've done so far. Any other tips/suggestions for saving space are welcome.