Thanks to some helpful tips from Wichard, I’ve cleaned up my Win8 installation. Funny thing: I’ve hardly used it (time I spent actively using it is measured in minutes, not in hours), yet Windows had managed to accumulate a lot of garbage. Probably most is due to upgrading from 8.0 to 8.1, but still…
Tips
- Turn hibernation off – that saves the diskspace for the hibernation file (several gigabytes).
Open a command prompt as an administrator (open command prompt, right-click on icon and select “Run as Administrator” and type powercfg -h off (for powerconfiguration hybernation off).
Space won:±5GB - Do a disk cleanup.
Regular disk cleanup will catch some things, but go into the advanced settings to get rid of all system restore points but the last one. You can even turn off system restore points, though I’m not sure you’d want to.
Space won (regular disk cleanup): ±1.5GB.
Space won (advanced disk cleanup): ±8GB. - Turn off the memory dump when crashing.
I have no clue any longer where this is found (probably “My computer > Properties” and then click around somewhere), but if you have a lot of memory in your computer, and it crashed once, you now have several gigs of hard disk space filled.
I went from roughly 14 GB free space to roughly 27.5GB free space.
Keep in mind that I’ve mostly run windows to install updates… :s
Seriously, MS, my disk isn’t so big and I’m dual-booting. Could you kindly stop gorging on the disk space buffet?
PS: Two more things to try:
- Reduce the size of the WinSXS folder.
Apparently, this one stores system restore points or somesuch, so maybe that was included in the “drop all system restore points but the last one”. Still, it can be a huge dir (was 15 gig before we started cleaning, didn’t check afterwards).
Edit: 7.9 GB. That’s worth cleaning up. - enable compression.
I don’t really use windows anyway. Moreover, my laptop is pretty kick-ass in the power department. Nothing fantastic, but it should be more than enough to enable disk compression… which will probably gain some more space.
Edit: I’ve also cleaned up the Ubuntu partition a bit: got rid of all photos from my phone (gain: 7 GB) and everything in the Videos folder (gain: 3 GB). Then I cleaned up old kernels following this advice, in a nutshell:
dpkg -l 'linux-*' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/;/[0-9]/!d' | xargs sudo apt-get purge
Gain: 3 GB.
I now have:
– 14 GB of free space in /home,
– 11 GB in /,
– 27 GB on the Windows partition.
So provisional plan:
- Clean up WinSXS folder to gain more GBs.
- Reduce windows partition by 15 GB or so.
- Increase Linux-/ partition by 10 or so GB.
- Increase Linux-/home partition by 5 GB or so.
Problem: this is an encrypted partition. So I might also just go for the SD slot option (see below).
As Wichard pointed out, I do have a slot for SD cards, so I might also use that for movies/photos/whatever. To ponder.