New install of Win 8.1... so how much disk space does yours eat up? <<Finally able to shrink down to 17GB>>

[jaguarskx]

So a relative of mine dropped off a relatively new laptop that was giving him some problems like programs crashing and that wonderful BSOD experience while he goes away on a trip. YAY!!! He has fun while I have work....

Anywaste... this is a 15.6" Dell Latitude 3540 and I re-installed Win 8 Pro and from the recovery partition and I have upgraded it to Win 8.1. Plus installed some programs to help keep his laptop safe from viruses. All updates have been applied. Also installed are Excel and Word 2007 from the disc he provided me. All together a total of 23.9GB is being used.

That 23.9GB of disc space does not include the pagefile which I set to the D: drive and the Hibernation file (since I deactivated hibernate). I will note that deactiviting hibernate causes the boot time to increase from 33 seconds to 49 seconds. It has been documented that hibernate does in fact affect boot time with Win 8 so I suppose I will enable it. He does not use that feature though.

I did the typical Disk Cleanup step and selected "Clean up system files". I also cleaned up the WinSXS folder using the DISM command in the console. And I also installed CCleaner to clean up all that other wonderful crap.

The programs I installed takes up less than 1GB in total so that drops the Win 8.1 footprint down to 22.9GB. The only crap software that came installed is a Cyberlink suite which takes about 1.2GB of storage space. I didn't uninstall it 'cause I don't know if he uses it. That drops the Win 8.1 foot print to about 21.7GB.

Looking at a list of programs to uninstall from within CCleaner, there is really nothing to uninstall. The only bloatware is that CyberLink suite I mentioned. The only "Dell software" is Dell Touchpad (I think he needs that) and Dell Backup and Recovery (umm.... sounds useful).... Everything else includes MS Visual some device drivers and the stuff I installed.

So... Is a 21.7GB big for Win 8.1? I sure think so. How big is (or was) your fresh install of Win 8?

Any suggestions to further trim the Win 8 fat? Or does 21.7GB sound about right?

 

[USAFRet]

I have a week old vanilla install of 8.1 Pro. Nothing else on it besides some free/open source applications from ninite.com. All relatively small.

Used space is 15GB.

 

[jaguarskx]

Interesting...

The biggest space hogs on the laptop I am working on are the following folders which totals 16.55GB.

System32 = 7.75GB
WinSxS = 5.6GB
Installer = 1.83GB
SystemWoW64 = 1.26GB

How much space do those directories occupy in your PC?

 

[jaguarskx]

Apparently all the updates I have done from a clean install, including upgrading to Win 8.1 Pro, has dumped about 5.0GB worth of drivers in the System32 / DriverStore / FileRepository directory.

 

[USAFRet]

Interesting...

The biggest space hogs on the laptop I am working on are the following folders which totals 16.55GB.

System32 = 7.75GB
WinSxS = 5.6GB
Installer = 1.83GB
SystemWoW64 = 1.26GB

How much space do those directories occupy in your PC?

System32 = 2.37GB
WinSxS = 5.3GB
SysWOW64 = 1.09GB
hiberfil.sys = 1.5GB (haven't turned it off yet)

 

[johnbl]

You might want to check if there is a left over c:\windows.old
folder from the upgrade process. 20 - 25 GB sounds about right for most installs (without trying to strip things down)

So a relative of mine dropped off a relatively new laptop that was giving him some problems like programs crashing and that wonderful BSOD experience while he goes away on a trip. YAY!!! He has fun while I have work....

Anywaste... this is a 15.6" Dell Latitude 3540 and I re-installed Win 8 Pro and from the recovery partition and I have upgraded it to Win 8.1. Plus installed some programs to help keep his laptop safe from viruses. All updates have been applied. Also installed are Excel and Word 2007 from the disc he provided me. All together a total of 23.9GB is being used.

That 23.9GB of disc space does not include the pagefile which I set to the D: drive and the Hibernation file (since I deactivated hibernate). I will note that deactiviting hibernate causes the boot time to increase from 33 seconds to 49 seconds. It has been documented that hibernate does in fact affect boot time with Win 8 so I suppose I will enable it. He does not use that feature though.

I did the typical Disk Cleanup step and selected "Clean up system files". I also cleaned up the WinSXS folder using the DISM command in the console. And I also installed CCleaner to clean up all that other wonderful crap.

The programs I installed takes up less than 1GB in total so that drops the Win 8.1 footprint down to 22.9GB. The only crap software that came installed is a Cyberlink suite which takes about 1.2GB of storage space. I didn't uninstall it 'cause I don't know if he uses it. That drops the Win 8.1 foot print to about 21.7GB.

Looking at a list of programs to uninstall from within CCleaner, there is really nothing to uninstall. The only bloatware is that CyberLink suite I mentioned. The only "Dell software" is Dell Touchpad (I think he needs that) and Dell Backup and Recovery (umm.... sounds useful).... Everything else includes MS Visual some device drivers and the stuff I installed.

So... Is a 21.7GB big for Win 8.1? I sure think so. How big is (or was) your fresh install of Win 8?

Any suggestions to further trim the Win 8 fat? Or does 21.7GB sound about right?

 

[jaguarskx]

You might want to check if there is a left over c:\windows.old
folder from the upgrade process. 20 - 25 GB sounds about right for most installs (without trying to strip things down)

The laptop does not such a folder since it is a clean install of Win 8 Pro, then upgrade to version 8.1.

Unfortunately, I have stripped everything down. Based on the folder created time in the System32 folder the upgrade to 8.1 dumped about 5.0GB of files there. There is not much bloatware after doing a clean install. That's basically the benefit of buying a business laptop, you don't want to piss off a large corporation that can potentially purchase 10's of thousands of laptops / desktops / servers over a period of time by installing stupid bloatware.

I did not have to uninstall a single program. The only bloatware is a CyberLink media suite that takes 1.25GB of storage. Since I do not know if my uncle is going to use it I just left it installed. There was not even a pre-installed anti-virus suite for me to uninstall since large companies would generally want to install whatever AV program they use.

 

[jaguarskx]

Alright, I finally was able to get the footprint down to about 17GB.

The issue was Shadow Copy. I reset the allocated size down to 2.5GB which apparently deleted the approximately 5.0GB shadow copy file.

Now I just need to image the c: drive so that if my uncle screws up the laptop again he will have a solid restore point.

 

[johnbl]

cool, I totally forgot about vssadmin.exe and the shadow copy service.
I have never tried to resize the shadowstorage before.

Alright, I finally was able to get the footprint down to about 17GB.

The issue was Shadow Copy. I reset the allocated size down to 2.5GB which apparently deleted the approximately 5.0GB shadow copy file.

Now I just need to image the c: drive so that if my uncle screws up the laptop again he will have a solid restore point.