All I have on C: is the OS and the installed programs. All my data and pictures and movie file are on a second partition. 50 gb each. I set it up this way so when my OS got messed up the next time I would not have to find a way to extract all my data and then reload the OS. Sounded like a great idea and it all worked well until...
The amount of room on C: was dwindling fast. Something was eating away at the allocation of space and it was getting real bad. Here is what I did and freed up over 15gb of space.
I moved the system restore files to my data area. That was eating into storage big time. I never realized how large those files were. Now I could have removed them all together, but that is not wise. So I shifted them to D: (my data partition) and made a starting restore point.
Here is how that was done on my Vista machine:
I started with the System Restore files. From the Start menu, I right-clicked Computer and selected Properties. On the System window I selected System protection. I unchecked the C: box which removed ALL past system restore points from drive C:. Then I checked the D: box to establish new restore point on that drive. I then forced the first restore point.
On the same System Properties window, click the Advanced tab and then under Performance click Settings. On the Performance Options, click the Advanced tab. Under Virtual memory, click Change. This lets you set the parameters for the System Paging File. If you are real tight on space you can override the System managed size and steal a few more bytes back from Windows.
Next I took a look at the Hybernate function. I really do not need to use it and each time it runs it makes a file as large as RAM and I have 4gb.
From a cmd window Run as Administrator, I ran powercfg -h off
(To run as an administrator, right-click on the command prompt in the start menu, and then choosing Run as Administrator. If you do not have a command prompt, click Start. In the search box type cmd and press Enter. Close the window that opens and open Start again. It should be there.)
This disabled Hibernate and then I located and deleted the hiberfil.sys file.
Amount of space recovered was over 15gb. Now I have plenty of room left on my system drive and can forget about that new hard drive I was considering. I have plenty of data room left, so more storage is unnecessary.
I also use CCleaner and SmartDefrag on a regular basis to clean up the junk on my drives and in my registry as well as reducing the number of fragments automatically as I am using the computer.
