Wednesday, 13 May 2009

Tip for clearing disk space under Windows

After going through the usual suspects* for clearing disk space you can normally squeeze some more space by deleting the folder “%SystemDrive%\Windows\SoftwareDistribution” (you need to stop the “Automatic Updates” Service first).

* Usual suspects are:

  • Use “Disk Cleanup” (find under System Tools).
  • Delete any files you don’t need under “%SystemDrive%\Windows\System32\LogFiles”.
  • Delete any old user profiles (“Advanced” tab in Properties of My Computer), note the reported size of the profile used is usually an outright lie and the space taken up by each profile is normally much bigger.
  • If you are running SQL Server, truncate the Log files, move the Data and Log files to another drive.

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