M$ Windows is eating your hard driver

No matter Bill says how friendly M$ Windows is. It is eating more and more my free disk space. Toady I figured out some tips for releasing disk space. In Windows file explore, you can not see the folder size without checking on property. So you may need a tool, something like FolderSizes. FolderSize helps me to know more about my heard diver. It shows me there is a folder 'System Volume information", this folder is 6.20GB big. What the hell is that??? I can not even see it in file explore. Then I check on Folder Options, here are so many hiding options for you. In order to take out that big folder, I unchecked '"Hide protected operating system files and folders", then the folder shows up. But I can not open it sine I really wants to know what hell is been hidden in that folder. A error message box popup up"Assess is denied." WOW this is my laptop, I am not able to access the folder. Is this a M$ asset? In FolderSize, I can go inside this folder; it has so many files. Everything in this folder looks like patch file. I have no idea where and when it went down my computer; or this dame OS made it. Now I'm deleting these files and folders in folder 'System Volume information" from FolderSize. Another error message box popup up; it says "Cannot delete XXX000.ps1: It is being used by another person or program". Kidding me? Does anyone share this laptop with me at this moment? Fortunately I have openSuSe, I issued rm -rf command after booted into openSuse. Now 6.2GB space was released.



Within FolderSize, one more fat folder was identified out, It is ''C:\Documents and Settings\LocalService\Local Settings\Application Data\Google'. I have Google Desktop on my laptop, but I did not use Google desktop search too much, but it take me near 2GBs space. I realized Google desktop indexed my whole hard drive anyway. I have to uninstalled Google Desktop and deleted that folder. Now I got more 2GB space.

M$ Windows also did anther favorite for me to created a fat pagefile.sys. It is 3.5 GB; Big~~ isn't it? My laptop have 4GBs physical RAM, but XP only use 3.5GB. As same 32bit OS, openSuSE does use all of 4GB. Since I am short of free space, pagefile.sys was changed to 1.5GB. SO, 2GB spaces was saved.

In XP file system, there are some files can not be deleted. I bet you do have some files like that. Those files are already useless, but you can't get rid of them. ForceDel.exe can delete them all. This tiny tool saved me more then 1GB space.

6.2+2+2+1=11.2GB

There are more screen-shots, please check out: http://picasaweb.google.com/liuzh66/Mis and comment.

Ok now I'm be able to create at least two VMWare machines for my work. I hope those tips are helpful for you.

In this week, I'm so busy on a Bladelogic product POC testing for CCB which is one of the biggest bank in China. At evening, I usually had to study on ITIL v3 stuff in order to get myself ready for a upcoming training next month. But tonight I'd like to take time off of the work.

XP磁盘空间节省偏方

• 通过类似于FolderSize的工具找出磁盘中占比重比较大的目录，识别需要删除的目录


• 对于System Volume information里的文件，可以用一个USB或者CD引导的Linux系统启动机器，删除；然后再关闭xp中的系统恢复功能


• 如果你不经常使用Google Desktop，或者已经删除了这个程序的话，一定记得删除它建的索引