Cleaning up your hard disk

As I stated earlier I have setup a VPC image on my tablet.  I’ve been working on getting a base VPC image of Windows XP Pro SP2 that I can copy off to my desktop.  Then whenever I want to spin up a new VPC image for development, test, or a beta product I can just copy this virtual hard drive file over, attach it to a new VPC profile and start there.  This will save quite some time as I would already have an OS already loaded with all my normal utilities installed (clipname, power toys I use, etc.).

Anyhow, as I was creating this VPC image I set my hard drive partition in the VPC to be about 10 GB.  This should be plenty for a OS, Dev tools and most projects.  The neat thing about VPC is that it will only expand the size of the hard drive image to the size it needs, it doesn’t just reserve 10 GB worth of disk space on the host machine.  I loaded the Win XP Pro OS from my MSDN disk, this took up just under a GB after installing the windows components I wanted (IIS, etc.).  Then I applied SP2 to the image.  The size of the disk jumped to nearly 3 GB!  All that restore points and replaced files in the OS were still hanging around. 

Enter the Disk Cleanup tool for XP.  It’s under the System tools in your Assecories menu (or type CleanMgr in your Run command window).  This analyzes the drive and determines some places where you can get rid of temp files, compress other files, etc.  But more importantly, on the Advanced tab of the tool there is a System Restore clean up utility.  Clicking that Clean Up button will cause all but the most recent restore point to be removed.

I can’t say I saved that much on the VPC hard drive image (about a Gig was freed for the image itself), but when I ran it on my tablet host OS I got back about 6 GB!  On a 40 GB drive this is not a small amount of space!

If you are comfortable in your system’s current configuration and don’t need anything but the most recent system restore I’d run this utility and claim some space back!  Just make sure you understand each of the options you use when using the first tab of the utility to get back some space.