What's taking up the space?

My Daughter has a HP laptop. I'm not sure of the model as there doesn't seem to be anything written on it anywhere but it's one of the smaller (10.5"?) with no DVD drive. It's running Win10. Win10 wants to upgrade but It's telling her that it's low on hard drive space (25.3 of 29.1Gb used). She's got hardly anything on the drive, mainly uses our networked drive. I've had a quick poke around and it's reporting 'System + reserved' as 16.3Gb, 'System files' as 13.7Gb and Winsxs as 8.61Gb. What's the best way to find out exactly what's taking up the space and what can I get rid of? 16.3Gb for 'system + reserved' seems a bit excessive to me.

 

Use Dism++ to cleanup WinSxS assembly, Backup and temp files.

 

1) you wanna turn off Fast Startup. Fast Startup is just fancy way of starting up Windows, what it does is, when you shut down the laptop, Windows saves the state of the loaded drivers and system files so that it would load them faster upon the next startup but the downside of that is a) it takes up a good amount of space on your drive to store all this info in a file called hiberfile.sys and b) it takes way longer to shutdown as the computer needs to save the current state first.

In Essence, Fast Startup is just is a hybrid of a full shutdown + hibernation. I mean c'mon, starting your computer 5 seconds slower isn't gonna be the end of the world so what you wanna do is:

1) Go to Control Panel > Power Options > then from the left pane, click on " Choose what the power button does" > then from the top click on the text which says " Change settings that are currently unavailable" then uncheck the box which says Fast Startup

2) Now, to free up the space which is occupied by the hiberfile.sys, click on the Start Menu, then scroll down to the end to Windows System then right click on Command Prompt and choose Run as Administrator

3) now type powercfg -h off and hit enter

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Now, let's use the disk cleanup advanced shortcut to clean up all the previously downloaded but installed Windows Updates that we no longer need

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Download this file: http://www.mediafire.com/file/73r686tn8no1xw1/Disk+Cleanup+Shortcut.zip

Now right click on the file you just downloaded and choose Run as Administrator

Check all the boxes from top to bottom then hit ok to start the clean up, this will take a very long time so just let it do its thing


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Download DISM ++

Extract the files to a folder then run Dism++x64.exe as admin by right clicking on it and choosing Run as Administrator

From the left pane, click on the Disk Clean text, then select everything from top to bottom

Now click on the Clean Up button and let it do its thing

 

as always, very thorough..

 

Try using SpaceSniffer. It's a free 2.2mb exe that will display a block graph of how all your storage space is being taken up. It's similar to windirstat, but both are free.
(these utilities just shows you whats taking up space and where)

http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/index.html

 

TreeSize Free is another good utility for seeing what's taking up all the space.

 

Okay, so I've turned off fast start up, run powercfg -h off and run disk cleanup. DISM++ is running and has been for quite some time. I assume this does take a long time and hasn't locked up on me. Oh life was so much easier when you booted to DOS 3.2 on 5 1/4" floppies

 

Yes mate it takes a lot of time especially on slower laptops as it needs to scan all the useless files that are no longer needed since Windows updated them so please be patient and report back how much space you have after doing all the recommendations that I posted.

 

Well, it's finished. It's gone from 25.3gb used to 19gb used. According to spacesniffer windows is still using 16.1gb of which Winsxs is using 6.2gb, system32 4.9gb and syswow64 1.2gb. Program files 3.6gb.

Oh well, it's better than it was! As I said earlier, life was so much easier when you booted from floppies!

 

Have had very good results with dism++, seen WinSxS shred up to 10GB (with everything working fine afterwards :O)

To be safe whatever may happen, am always starting any important cleanup\intrusion with a disk image (Reflect, or whatever works for you), then if pushing some 'wrong button' at half past three in the night, a restore to full functional state and try again with adjusted parameters is just a matter of minutes.

 

By 'Reflect' do you mean Macrium Reflect 7? Is it any good? I've been thinking I should back up each of the families laptops/PCs but so far haven't got around to it.

 

See this guide: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/macrium-reflect-installation-usage-guide.804746/