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Losing Disk Space On C:\ Windows 7

Anonymous
2020-07-20T18:45:31+00:00

Hello. 

I know this is a fairly common question and I have seen a lot of people ask it but I have yet to see anyone include this particular detail, possibly because my search results are skewed for whatever reason...

Anyway, I have a 1TB hard drive with actual capacity of 931 Gigabytes as seen by Windows 7. Just last night, over the course of a few minutes I watched as 50 megabytes free space remaining dwindled down to 6 megabytes. No new programs were being added, nothing was being downloaded (at least to my knowledge). I opened up the Computer folder and looked at all my hard drives when I got a low disk space alert. It was very odd as just a few days ago I had at least 10 gigabytes free, and no new programs had been installed. I hit the refresh button at the top several times and each time I did I saw the amount of free space on C:\ go down. 

I have tried disk clean up and a bunch of other programs and "fixes" to this problem found all over the web, but none have solved it. Disk cleanup is completely worthless by the way, it always crashes when scanning dump files or something. It has never completed its task in the entire time I've had this computer. Today I found that my C:\Windows folder is 657 gigabytes. 

Obviously that is the source of the problem. Unfortunately, the folders do not display their size unless I right-click them and select properties for each one individually.

My question is, what folders in C:\Windows can I simply delete from the hard drive without causing issues?

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Files, folders, and storage

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  1. Anonymous
    2020-07-20T20:00:50+00:00

    I will be very interested to hear how you fared.  Follow Lem's advice.  Sounds like a good tip.  The author of the article referenced is none other than the famous Woody of AskWoody.com

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  1. Anonymous
    2020-07-20T19:13:37+00:00

    My question is, what folders in C:\Windows can I simply delete from the hard drive without causing issues?

    Before you delete anything in a system folder you must find out what is eating your disk space. This free tool will tell you:

    http://www.jam-software.com/treesize\_free/

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  1. Anonymous
    2020-07-20T19:33:59+00:00

    Stand back a minute.  Good disk management practice is that as you exceed 75% of usable capacity, C drive will become less and less responsive.  When you get up to the point where you have 98% in use, your system may not be able to function at all.   

    If you were my client, I would advise you to take a lot of those very big files (usually videos) and move them to an external drive, OR invest in a much larger drive.  

    In fact, if your system otherwise runs well, you can make a system image of that drive on a 2TB or larger external drive.  Then replace you 1TB drive with a much larger one and restore the image to it.

    2TB drives do not cost all that much today.

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  2. Anonymous
    2020-07-20T19:27:34+00:00

    Thanks. I had already found, and deleted, a LOT of stuff from that directory when I found the TEMP subfolder to be well over 300 gigabytes. There were 15,355 files dating all the way back to 2015 in a folder where files are supposed to be temporary. I got rid of those. Apparently Windows 7 is not capable of actually deleting temporary files automatically when they're no longer useful. I am running the treesize program now.

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