30 GB Used after Fresh Windows 7 Install?

Title say's it all, I bought a default Alienware M17x R3 3D, and then purchased the Intel 510 Series 120 GB SSD after market, I installed it today and did a clean Windows 7 install, installed all the Drivers, disabled System Restore, yet the drive is saying that 28.0 GB is being used out of 111.0 GB.

I checked what has been installed, and it adds up to approximately 17 GB in total, so I'm just wondering where the other 11 GB is disappearing to?

And, I'm wondering if it's normal that the Windows folder is almost 15 GB large (using Windows 7 64 bit).

 

Download ccleaner and run it (I find it cleans up to 3GB after a clean install!).

The 11GB could be your pagefile, your hibernation file (both dependant on the amount of RAM you have installed) and whether or not you installed Win7 SP1 directly or applied the SP1 patch afterwards.

With regards to your Drivers... are they also sitting off the root of C:?

I am testing a method which gives an ~8GB footprint on the C: with Win7x64 SP1 and either a second HDD or a partition. This includes disabling SR, pagefile and hibernation on C: (of course!).

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/win...gramdata-folder-separate-drive-partition.html

See:
Windows 7 SP1 Disk Cleanup Tool - Windows 7 Forums


The SP1 cleanup above typically removes about 3 or more GB's in my experience.

The method I use (method 2 in link above) is opening a cmd prompt with Admin priviliges and running/pasting:

dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded /hidesp

Good luck.

 

The pagefile size equals your RAM size and the hibernate file is at least of the same size, even more. They consume the space on your SSD.
You have to do something to get rid of them.

 

pagefile is usually 1.5 times your RAM and hibernate is no bigger than amount of RAM. Either way these days with 8GB RAM that means 12GB pagefile and 8GB hibernate, which is (hard math I know) 20GB. If you don't hibernate, just open an elevated command prompt (i.e. open as administrator) and type:

powercfg -h off

And that will disable your hibernate. Then just go to your system properties, Advanced tab, performance, settings, advanced, virtual memory, change. And deselect "Automatically manage paging files for all drives" then set your range from like 256MB Min to 2048MB Max.

You can also reduce amount of space gobbled up by system restore, unless you plan on going more than a few system restore points back in the past, 1% is more than enough. Go back to system properties, system protection tab, click configure button, and adjust it to 1%. There's a way to make it even less, but I won't go there for now since it takes a little command prompt entry to configure.

 

pagefile is kind of pointless with an ssd, correct? it's kind of extended ram on your hdd, but real slow? and is hibernate still a viable option or is it just better to turn off your laptop? i'm thinking about it, and hibernate basically writes your ram to your storage for a quicker bootup, rather than a full bootup. so does hibernate use up more write cycles or something else negative to the wear of an ssd?

 

Pagefile isn't really pointless, it's just faster than with HDD. Some apps still require pagefile regardless of the amount of RAM too.

Hibernate will be extra writes, every time you hibernate it will write to the SSD. But if you don't use it, turn it off.

 

ok, to clarify on the hibernate, i don't use it often. with the speed of ssd, is it better to shutdown or set your lappy to shut down after idle use? i am buying in to ssd mainly because i'm reading that it's multi tasking capability is unmatched and the other reason is i've been more mobile with my laptop recently so no moving parts, no risk of hdd corruption/damage. trying to figure out the steps to my clean install before i get it so i don't have to ask all these dumb questions later. i still have my old laptop to use for reference in case something goes wrong, but i want to hit the ground running full speed, if you know what i mean.

 

Just for your info.

On a 8 GB RAM HP 8530w

hiberfil.sys is 6.214.860 KB
pagefile.sys is 8.286.480 KB

 

Those are dynamically expanding files, depending on the usage. 1.5 times is "allocated" for the pagefile, so it can grow to be that large, but default over 4GB is typically set 1x the RAM with room to expand to 1.5x the RAM. In actuality that pagefile is reserved space but not actually being consumed by the drive. Hibernate is also allocated space and not used until you actually go to hibernate, so it will only fill what's being used in RAM.

In any case, to answer pukemon's question about hibernate, that is a feature up to the user. SSD's boot fast, but if you want to capture your desktop as it's set up so when you turn your machine back on from hibernate, it will be as it was before. But these days sleep mode consumes so little power, just disable hibernate and use sleep mode instead. It only has to charge the RAM to maintain its contents, which is a few watts at most.

When you get your SSD, if you do a clean install, just use it, don't worry about anything else. The current and next gen tech don't really require any maintenance unless you want to eek every last bit of performance out of your SSD.

 

After the SP1 clean-up and disableing the hibernate option my drive says 130GB of 149GB is free.

I have installed Win7 Ultimate x64 with a few default programs (Office 2007, Adobe Reader, Antivirus, etc.)

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I prefer to leave hibernate enabled as insurance against losing anything I have open if my battery dies.

 

As long as your system is set to hibernate instead of sleep, that's a good choice if that is a concern.

I've known people to say they left hibernate enabled but set their computer to sleep and pulled the battery out to show how fool proof it is, and lol, to their surpise, the system did a fresh reboot.