Best Windows 7 System Drive Space-Saving Techniques

In the past couple of weeks, I’ve gone through some systematic exercises to reduce the disk space consumed on my Windows 7 system/boot drives, especially on notebook/laptop systems where disk space is always precious and sometimes scarce, but also on a couple of my desktops where I’m running SSDs for the speed they bring to start-up, shut-down, application lauches, and context switching maneuvers. Here are some pointers to recent blogs I’ve written on various related topics on my personal Website at edtittel.som in the Windows 7 Tips and Tricks section:

• More Noodling on System Drive Space-Saving: Move those VHDs! (Moved Windows XP VHD to a subsidiary grive. Space saved: 6.8 GB)
• Nvidia: Why Do I Need 3D by Default?  (Uninstalled Nvidia PhysX, 3D, and Nvidia Update drivers for a savings of nearly 35 MB of RAM, and disk space savings of nearly 1 GB.)
• Interesting tips and tweaks for PST File cleanup & optimization (Used the ScanPST.exe repair tool and compacted PST files to save around 2 GB of system disk space.)

All told I was able to reduce system disk size by at least 5 GB on each system where I tried to use two or more of these techniques. In one case, the savings was over 10 GB where I was able to reduce drivers, compact PSTs, and move the Windows XP VHD to my F: drive. I like it! Got any similar tips to share? Please do, and I’ll write them up if I can put them to work, too.

Here’s a concluding recommendation: try out the free WinDirStat graphical file system display utility. It will show you which files on your drives are the biggest, and point you at the fattest (if not most vulnerable) targets for cleanup. That’s what got me started down the cleanup road I document in the various aforecited blogs.