Laptop hard drive usage query

searchlight123

hi all
this is really puzzling me now!!
i followed gunjacks advice (many thanks) and did a disk cleanup as suggested (and the 'clean up system files' button used). it reported it could clean 11gb of drive. i thought it would be far more, anyhow i did all this (it took around 10 minutes) then i restarted the laptop and i have gained a measly 2gb of space!!

whilst rebooting it did display a message saying 'cleaning files' or something similar and took around 5 minutes to boot up to windows (usually boots in around 1.5 mins).

have rerun treesize free and still the system volume info is shown at 98gb. all very strange and i suppose i'm just head scratching now to find out where this hard drive space has gone. i really thought the disk cleanup was doing something major as it did take at least 15 minutes but all for 2gb!!

any other suggestions guys?

many thanks.

forgotmyname

Left over windows updates files also. Than can fill several hundred mb easily and can quite easily fill many gigs worth.

searchlight123

thanks forgotmyname
how do i locate and delete those windows update files please?

also can't see anything in ccleaner that refers to deleting old restore points?

bod1467

In CCleaner click the Tools tab then click the System Restore option. The restore points will be listed. Select those you want to remove (e.g. leave the latest 2 or 3) and then click on Remove.

(CCleaner v5.01.5075)

I gained over 40GB of space doing this.

Strider590

Open up "My Computer" called just "Computer" on Win7, do a search by file size for anything over 100mb in size. Now unfortunately they removed the interface for doing this in Win7 and replaced it with a !!!!!! search toolbar, but you can search for Tiny, Small, Medium, Large, Huge and Gigantic. So search for Gigantic and see what comes up.

Do the same in the %temp% folder, as you may have a lot of junk in there too.
Type %temp% in the Run command from the start menu to see that folder (it's normally hidden). Often when you download things, they are downloaded to that folder and then moved/copied to the folder you want them in, leaving a full sized copy behind in your temporary files.

bod1467

OR .... you could just use CCleaner.

searchlight123

i ran the updated version of ccleaner (i had an old version from 2010 that didn't include an option to delete system restores).
i left on the last 3 restore points and deleted the rest which has freed up 72gb of my hard drive.
many thanks for the advice given by various people on here.

John_Gray

You should also set the amount of space which the Restore Points can take to a sensible percentage of your hard disk - probably less than 10%, perhaps 5%? Otherwise they will just increase to the point you were at before!

searchlight123

John_Gray wrote: »

You should also set the amount of space which the Restore Points can take to a sensible percentage of your hard disk - probably less than 10%, perhaps 5%? Otherwise they will just increase to the point you were at before!

Thanks for advice John. How do I set that percentage?
Thanks.

John_Gray

Start -> Control Panel -> System -> System Protection -> System Protection tab -> click on protection settings for C: drive -> Configuration button -> Disk Space Usage -> Max usage slider.
Set to percentage required, then Apply and OK out...