Running out of hard drive space in Windows 7

As I prefer SSDs for the fast read/write speeds for my main hard drive, I tend to run out of space (especially on my Macbook with a paltry 256GB). To add salt to the wound, I'm running a dual boot Windows and OS X partition, and I was a little stingy for the Windows side since I run it less then OS X. Then came the crunch - space seemed to just disappear!

I've collected some information on cleaning up some junk that resides on our hard drive, which was especially useful when you're starved for MBs.

Run this once:

Shrink your WinSxS folder
1. Run CMD with elevated priviledges.
2. cmd> dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded

This alone saved me 5 GB of space. It essentially cleans up backup files from service pack installation, so make sure you have at least SP1 installed - if not that it might not work.

The following steps you can run on a consistent basis to squeeze as much space out of your system.

Clean up Windows update downloads:

%windir%\SoftwareDistribution\Download\

What you're deleting: Downloaded files via Windows Update

Remove baseline patch caches:

%SystemRoot%\Installer\$PatchCache$

What you're deleting: Installing and updating programs which use windows installer format keep cache to handle repair installations, so you would need original installation media to repair/update

Remove junk in temp and cache folders:

%tmp% or %Temp%

What you're deleting: Files in the temporary folder are created by installing software, user operations - constantly filled with crap

%SystemRoot%\Temp

What you're deleting: Temporary files used by system account since internal system operations create temporary files

%HOMEPATH%\Dropbox\.dropbox.cache

What you're deleting: Cache files that dropbox creates along the way as it syncs - this surprisingly takes up a ton of space if you're not careful!