Windows 7 Enterprise/Ultimate - System Partition Continually Growing/Expanding?

Hi all,

Just using the 90 day Win7 Enterprise trial available from MS for professional assessment. Been using it for about 2 months, so far.

Initialy I installed both 32-bit and 64-bit and was pleased with the easy dual boot arrangement, no fiddling about. Both were installed on 25GB partitions. Used 64-bit mostly and started noticing that the space required by windows on the system partition was constantly growing.

Eventually dumped the 32-bit install and put fresh 64-bit install on a 50GB partition, initially requiring about 12-16GB of space I think.

Now, the system partition is using 38GB (!) of space on the system partition, and this is constantly creeping upwards.

For info, I have installed most of the third party apps and data onto a separate partition. I've put Users on D: and keep all my data on D:, including remapping the links over to D:

Without me going in to more detail, is anyone aware of things to look for in Win7 that cause growth of the system disk?

Laptop's got 4GB of ram and page file is fixed at the recommended amount of 4989MB on C:

Any general advice, pointers or useful links appreciated.

Apols if the post is lacking detail, happy to provide more if required.

Best.

 

Right click on your hard drive and then click on properties
Go to disk clean up, when it has finished scanning go on the advanced tab and then System Restore and Shadow Copies "clean up all but the most recent restores" this is applicable on W7 and Vista

Report back on results


Alex

 

Are you saying you copied C:\Users over to D:\Users after installation? If so, how exacyly did you do that? Is System Restore turned on?

 

@Alex,

Thanks for the heads up on VSC - didn't know much about that. From your pointer, found this good guide on Volume Shadow Copy (VSC):

http://blog.szynalski.com/2009/11/23/volume-shadow-copy-system-restore/

I deleted all but last restore but no dice - no weight loss.

@Pirx
No, I didn't deploy C:\Users to d:, for the two user accounts on the machine I just manually moved all the obvious user data folders (docs, music, pics, etc etc) over to d: using "Change Location". The OS is still doing whatever it does in Users on c:, I;m just storing all my major data on D:\. Apps and User specific settings under the hood etc are still mainly hammering C:, if that's what they were designed to do.

 

Hmm, so you did everything right as far as I can tell. You might give WinDirStat a try, and see if that shows you some suspicious areas. WinDirStat produces a graphical display of the size of various areas of your file system, which may help you find out what it is that is taking up the space.

 

+1 for that.

WinDirStat is the first thing to try when space starts disappearing. Usually it's shadow copies, but not this time apparently.

 

Thanks all. WinDirStat's given me some useful insight. Some cache junk left by adobe media encoder, but most else is a spread of windows, page file and hib file and app-related stuff.

Time to re-think where I'm installing and configuring certain apps I guess. Many thanks.

 

How big is your winsxs folder?

 

This is going nowhere. The winsxs doesn't consume anywhere as much space on the disk as Windows Explorer indicates: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2008/11/19/disk-space.aspx

Do not delete anything indside the winsxs folder!
It may make your system unstable or act weird. What will work for one specific system doesn't necessarily work for another.

 

Did you have a play with the options; show free space and especially show unknown. 'Unknown' often is the problem; stuff that is there but windows doesn't recognise.

 

Hi all,

Thanks for continuing input on this.

Having had a browse with WinDirStat, and without ongoing trend analysis at this time, the obvious culprits seem to be:

Adobe CS4's caching of temp files during encoding activities when dealing with video projects, despite the suite being installed to z:\. Premiere Elements 4 was equally bad, now I think about it.
Google Chrome cache accounting for a fair bit across multiple accounts
Various odds and sods I'd forgotten about
Temp files from other applications

So, nothing particularly insightful and a suggestion that this is more a PICNIC rather than a windows thing per se.

Thanks for the all the useful input and for pointing me at VSC and WinDirStat, all very useful knowledge and tools.

Gotta love Adobe - bloating your system in the background since God knows when.

 

Adobe CS4 isn't exactly a package for a lightweight system.