Then again, users who have installed the service pack without complications do not necessarily need those backup files that allow them to uninstall the service pack anymore. These users can free up disk space on the Windows partition by deleting the backup files.

I recommend to test the operating system with service pack at least for a few days before you make the decision to delete the backups. Impatient users may create an image of their system partition instead that they can use to restore the system if the need arises to uninstall the service pack after the backup data has been removed from the system.

How much disk space are we talking about? I just made the test on a Windows 7 Professional 64-bit system. The free space increased from 18.9 Gigabytes before the cleanup to 22.2 Gigabytes after. That’s more than 3 Gigabytes of space. It is likely that 32-bit users will be able to free up less space than that due to the nature of their operating system. Still, they will free up Gigabytes as well.

Removing Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Backup Files

The easiest way to remove the backup files of the Windows 7 Service Pack 1 installation is the following. Open an elevated command prompt. You do that with a click on the start orb, the selection of All Programs > Accessories, a right-click on Command Prompt and the selection of Run as Administrator.

Use the following command to free up disk space after the service pack installation:

dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded

The process takes a few minutes to complete, it ends with the sentences “Service Pack Cleanup operation completed. The operation completed successfully”.

Please remember that you cannot uninstall the service pack after you have cleaned up the disk space. Please let me know how much disk space you freed up with the command.

Want additional information on dism? Take a look at the Driver Servicing Command-Line Options over at Technet. ]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2011/02/23/remove-windows-7-sp1-backups-to-free-up-disk-space/feed/ 72 http://www.ghacks.net/2011/02/14/free-up-disk-space-by-deleting-older-google-chrome-versions/ http://www.ghacks.net/2011/02/14/free-up-disk-space-by-deleting-older-google-chrome-versions/#comments Mon, 14 Feb 2011 14:56:50 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/?p=39859 You may know that I have a Intel Solid State Drive with 80 Gigabytes of space as my primary hard drive. Windows 7 is installed on that drive and the majority of applications that I use. I recently noticed that the drive was showing that only 10 Gigabytes of free space were remaining. I was not aware of any “big” changes that I made, either by moving or copying data to the c: drive or by installing or updating and application that would be responsible for the loss of free space.

I decided to investigate and noticed that my User data folder was by far the largest folder on the system, with more than 22 Gigabytes of space that data in it occupied.

The Google Chrome web browser, to my surprise, occupied almost 3.5 Gigabytes of space on the drive, which seemed awfully lot. A closer investigation showed the following space distribution:

The Chrome folder that you see belongs to the Chrome dev version that I use on the system, the Chrome SxS folder to the Chrome Canary version that I installed recently.

Google as you can see keeps copies of older versions of the browser on the drive. This went back to December 2010 for the Chrome Dev version for instance. It is not clear why the versions are not deleted after an update. Even if it is for restoration purposes it would usually be enough to keep one or two of the last versions but nine feels like overkill.

It is possible to delete those old folders right away.There does not seem to be any negative impact on the browser or system. I managed to reduce the storage space requirements from 3.4 Gigabytes to 600 Megabytes just by deleting those old folders from the hard drive.

2.8 Gigabytes may not sound like much at first especially if you are running a hard drive with hundreds of Gigabytes of space. The knowledge however could be useful in the future as the Chrome installation directory grows in size with nearly every version increase.

Installing a single game or large application on the drive could be enough to fill it to the brim, which would result in performance drops all over the board, as hard drives react with performance drops if they are (almost) filled completely with data.

TreeSize Free is a freeware program for Windows that displays the space allocation of a drive or a selected folder. The calculations are fast, and the sizes and folder names are displayed in a tree style listing after the scan.

Each folder is shown with its icon, the space allocation of all files it contains and its name. Folders can be expanded if they have subfolders, to analyse the disk space usage of each subfolder. This does not require a new scan.

At each root level, the files are listed. A right-click opens the standard Windows Explorer menu with options to delete or copy files, a left-click will execute the selected file right away.

treesize free

The header bar at the top holds several options to change the display. It is for instance possible to switch from Megabytes to either Kilobytes or Gigabytes, switch to percentage view, display total number of files per folder instead of sizes, or change the sorting from size to names.

TreeSize Free is a lightweight and fast disk analyzer for Windows. A professional version is available as well, which adds reporting, duplicate file search and statistics to the program, which the free version does not offer.

The free version is fully sufficient for a quick overview of the largest folders of a hard drive. The program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7. An earlier version is provided for Windows 9x users.

My way of handling space problems on drives is to move the apps or games to another drive without having to reinstall them or lose data. I recently installed Dragon Age which installed itself on the c: drive. I decided to move the game from c:\ to the hard drive with lots of space instead.

The move process itself is easy enough. Just move the files in Windows Explorer, or any other file manager that you may be using, to another hard drive. You can move the folder by pressing shift during the drag and drop operation (if you do not press shift you copy the files).

Most games and applications will not start anymore after they have been moved around. The solution to this is to create symbolic hard links and Windows comes with the tool to do just that. Open a command prompt as an administrator. You find the Command Prompt under Accessories in the Windows Start Menu. Right-click the command prompt and select run as administrator.

The command that we are using to create a so called directory junction is mklink. A directory junction basically tells the operating system to create a mirror in another directory that provides access to all files of the selected directory in the mirror directory again. The files and folders of the mirror directory are however actually only redirected to the destination where they are actually hosted. This essentially means that you can make the game, application or Windows believe that the files and folders are still in their right place even if they are not.

mklink /J "new folder" "folder with the files"

That’s the basic command that we will be using. The /J parameter defines the type of symbolic link that we are creating, in this case a directory junction. The new folder is the mirror folder and the folder with files the folder containing the real files.

mklink /J "C:\program files (x86)\Dragon Age\" "e:\games\Dragon Age"

This creates a directory junction so that the files and folders of e:\games\Dragon Age are accessible by the program and Windows under C:\program files (x86)\Dragon Age\ as well (where they have been initially installed to).

C:\Windows\system32>mklink /J “c:\Program Files (x86)\Dragon Age\” “c:\games\Dragon Age\”
Junction created for c:\Program Files (x86)\Dragon Age\ <<===>> c:\games\DragonAge\

The same principle can be applied to other applications or games. It is for instance possible to move some Steam games or files to another hard drive to free up space on the one Steam is installed. Mklink is available in Windows Vista and Windows 7. I’m not sure about Windows XP right now, would be nice if anyone with XP could let me know in the comments. There are programs like Junction from Sysinternals that can create junctions as well in case that is needed.

With no install needed, just run it, select a drive and watch as the table structure fills up with folders and sub-folders. You can double click on any folder to bring it into main view (cool animation here), so you can see more detail. If you’ve zoomed in on a folder you can click the name again to zoom back out, or you can use the forward and back buttons like on a browser.

There are options to show unknown space, free space, but apart from that this app is a simple hard drive space analyzer, but a really very well made one. It is beautiful, it is elegant and it gives you the information you need in a form very easily digested by the human mind. I simply love this app, if you can and you like it too, please consider donating to them.

Melanie’s Review:

How to Reduce Disk Usage in Windows 7 with SpaceSniffer

After using your PC for awhile, you might begin to notice that available space on the hard drive is persistently decreasing. For the advanced user, this is not a problem and it is an easy fix. For the beginner, this can be confusing and it raises a question: Why is my disk space disappearing and how can I get it back? The beginning user may not understand what has happened. This article is for those users who do not know why this happens or what to do about it. Fear not, dear beginners! The disk space can be easily reclaimed.

Though there are several ways to cleanup old files and old programs that have not been used for a long time, we will look at a simple, free utility called SpaceSniffer. There is no need to install it, as it is run from an .exe file in the .zip archive. This utility will assist the new user in identifying the files and programs, etc. that is occupying hard disk space and then help them to clean it up.

You will want to download the latest version, which you will find at the top of the download page at the website. Look for version 1.1.3.1 and click to download. Beginner advice: Always open the containing folder for the program file before opening a program from the internet. Right-click on the file and select “Scan with ” and if the scan comes up clean, then you may open the file.

Since this is a .zip file, you will see 5 different files listed. Double-click the Application Type file pictured at the bottom in the screenshot above. There are two PDF files in the .zip archive as well. The user manual is full of great tips to help you get the most out of the utility.

In the “Choose drives or type paths” menu, choose the drive that you want to clear space on. In most cases, this will be drive (C:) which is the main hard drive for the operating system. If the drive is partitioned, you will need to clean those partitions separately but you will find them on the menu.

Once you click on the drive icon, SpaceSnifferr will run a scan and show how the disk is populated by particular files and programs. One area that is important to clean is temporary files. Type the pathway in the Filter box and then click Filter.

You will then be able to see the temporary files and how much disk space these occupy. Many of them can be removed and this will clear a significant amount of space on your hard drive.

You may also search by time period. For example, type >1year in the Filter box and then click Filter.

Areas that have not been used in greater than one year will be highlighted blue. In the following example, the major areas that could be cleaned are pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys. These occupy almost 6GB of drive space.

This is where the user manual comes in handy. You will have to read through a few pages, but there is a content sidebar that shows the different subjects. Use the information in the manual to help you clear unnecessarily occupied space on the hard drive. Once you get the hang of it, it is very easy to use.

OverDisk is one of these software programs. It generates an interesting looking chart after analysing a hard drives contents. The chart displays the root level, the folders on that level and most of the subfolders with the size on the chart reflecting the percentage of disk usage on the selected hard drive. Additional information are displayed when hovering the mouse over one of the elements of the chart including the name of the folder, the total number of files and folders as well as the size occupied on the hard drive. A click on an element will center the visualization on that folder and build a new chart that display the different folder levels starting with that folder in root. This is an easy and convenient way to browse through the folder structure of the selected hard drive.

Several statistical information are provided in the toolbar menu. Interesting and unusual is the cluster information dialog that displays various cluster sizes and their implication on the used and wasted space on the hard drive.

Another option is to run queries to find the largest files, longest or deepest path names, directories with most file entries or bytes and those with greatest wasted space. OverDisk is an interesting software program to visualize the space utilization of selected hard drives.

Update: The Overdisk website is no longer available. It returns a 404 error. You can download the latest Overdisk program version with a click on this link: Overdisk (78)

Whilst disk space is no longer seen as a problem, considering 1GB only costs about $0.20! However, I find it an issue on my MacBook where I only have 120GB of space and it can’t easily be expanded.

Finding hogs could be quite a task. Naturally, trawling through every directory is impractical, so automated tools must be used to find large directories and files. Software exists on most major operating systems to graphically show which folders are large and how large they are.

In 2005, gHacks reported about WinDirStat. This is freeware that shows how big directories are. WinDirStat displays everything in the C:\ (etc) drive, colour coded for the first level directory (eg Program Files or Windows), and on tiers below that it is divided as blocks. This is a easy to use visualisation. WinDirStat runs on all Windows operating systems from 95 (w/IE5) to Vista!

An OS X alternative to WinDirStat is Disk Inventory X. It is essentially identical to WinDirStat. GrandPerspective is another essentially identical option.

Linux users can choose between KDirStat or Baobab.

Another option is JDiskReport is a Java-based piece of software which analyses disk usage using pie charts. Presumably this will work on Windows, OS X and Linux.

The program displays all connected storage devices, their capacity, free space and occupied space in the beginning and it is up to the user to narrow down the data by using the computer browser in the left pane.

A click on a drive letter will start an in depth disk space analysis of that drive which will display all files and folders from that root level on sorted by their size. It is possible to sort by name, type or date modified instead. A click on a folder will load the contents of that folder and display the data accordingly.

The Windows Explorer context menu is available after a right-click on a file or folder which means it is possible to perform operations like opening or deleting them right in the program’s interface.

The display mode can be switched to display only the files or folders sorted by size again. These two display modes are excellent to identify the largest (or smallest) files or folders on a specific drive or in a folder.

Files are sorted by their size and additional information like the filename, location and their relative size on the hard drive are listed. The folder display mode contains the same information plus information about the number of files and the average file size.

Links to drive cleanup and drive tools are provided for each drive letter in the general display mode. Cleanup will run the drive cleanup tool that is supplied with Windows while Disk Tools will display the disk properties of that disk.