Clear up some gloat from XP (i cleared 2 gigs!)

[Blade Runner]

Heres some tips on removin some gloat from XP (courtesy of maximum pc)....

1. Take Advantage of Service Pack 1 (its already installed)
Start>Control Panel>Add or Remove programs>Add/Remove Windows Components, uncheck the programs you want to remove, click "Next," and reboot to make the changes. Removin IE will disable automatci Windows Update service, but you can still access updates by going to http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/s...y/default.asp.

I just removed msn explorer (13megs).

2. Resizing Your Caches
The IE cache get 2 to 3 % or you hard drive by default. This small percentage adds up to more than 600mb on a 20gb drive and up to 3gb on a 100gb drive. Lower this setting by opening the browser and going to Tools>Internet Options and click the Settings button. 200mb is a good size, but 300mb is advisable if you have a dial-up modem or frequently visit sluggish sites.

Mine is on 261MB *shrugz*

System Restore is next. Right-click My Computer, select Properties, and click the System Restore tab. System Restore uses around 12% of the drive, so adjusting to 1% can reclaim many gigs of space. Its advisable to leave at least 700-800mb for System Restore.

Mine is 1000 something.

The Recycle Bin default setting is 10%-thats 10g on a 100g drive for you math whizzes. You can reclaim sever gigs by movin the slider downl. Its recommended you set it to accept 500mb max. Note: Files larger than the size you choose will be permanently deleted.

Mine is around 600MB. You check by clicking the local disk tab.

3. System DUmp
Make sure you dump is on small. Righ-click My Computer, select Properties, click the Advanced tab, and go to "Startup and Recovery." Now click Settings and go to the "Write debuggin information" drop-down menu. The recommended setting is Small memory dump (64k).

4. Nixing Annoying Start-Up Programs.
After a while, a lot of programs will start showing up in you System Tray every time the PC starts. Those apps can eat a lot of system mem, slow down your boot times, and just plain annoy you. To disable or remove these items, go to Start, then Run, then type msconfig and press Enter. At the Startup tab you'll see a list of every program that loads when you boot, along with the location of the startup files. To stop automatic loading, either uncheck the box next to the app entry, or track down the parent app and disable the System Tray opton from there. Its recommended you disable only one app at a time. That way, when you're rebooting the PC to enable the changes, you'll have a much easier time tracking down problems in the even that something goes wrong.

I disabled MSN Messenger, Quicktime, and my burner programs.


Hope this helps. I almost got 2gig back so it does work....

Thanx to maximum pc again. Good magazine, get it!

[Null]

could do all that before.


And why not delete msn messenger? you dont actually use it do you?

i would do all that. except...

1. some of it was done long ago

2. With about 140GB of HD space, and 768MB ram, you just tend not to care about the little things like 13MB disk space. etc.


but yea. saw that in the magazine, personally tho i find PCworld gives a few more interesting tips for things like that.

[Mushlafa]

Im not really in need of clearing up space on the HD... but if i ever needed to.. i would just clear up my dumb 10 gb of porn..... currently system resotre is eating 9 gb meh.. whatever

[GameMaster]

On the Mac, I use a nice little program called Spring Cleaning that does it all for me.

[Dyne]

Thanks man..

My laptop is mysterious... apparently there's 17 gigs taken up and 3 free... and I restored .55 gigs after this.

I continued my investigation to the heart of it all: C drive. Apparently my Program Files and Document settings take up only 3 gigs and 1 gig, respectively. Then there's music... which is a bit over a gig.. then theres Windows, which is about 2 gigs...... well, what else is there? Nothing I can see.... It's confusing the hell out of me.

EDIT: My dad's business folder is only 2 gigs..

[Blade Runner]

If xp os it takes about 2. I dunno bout the rest

[Dyne]

......

Anyways.... if you're still unsure about your space, you can always use disk clean up. Right now I'm cleaning up my old files (it zips them all up) and that saves well over 4 gigs. Plus, I just found out that Links 2002 takes up 1.5 gigs.... and, to boot, my dad never plays it. 5 gigs right there!

Wubba wubba! I'm in the pink today.

[sdtPikachu]

Ugh, XP takes up so much diskspace it makes me sick. My RedHat8.0 install took up 2 gigs, which included all the graphical environments I could find, and about eight million programs, including five web browsers, a complete office suite (openoffice), three email programs and three media players. Oh yeah, and DVD's and DivX work just great now

Just try and remove any apps (MSN messenger for one; use Trillian or Jabber instead!). Kill system restore; it keeps gobs of discspace. My recycle bin I never use... I get PGP to wipe all the files I want to delete.

You can't remove IE. It's the same as Explorer, which is the core of Windows NT now. You could remove explorer properly in 98, but not any more. Ah, isn't product integration a great thing? I've just configured IE and Windows Media Player so that they can't access the internet anyway.

IE cache? Heh. My Opera and Mozilla caches are set at 2 GB each, and I never flush them out. I like being able to cache lots of stuff.

And if you're going to kill annoying startup programs (that is, if you were daft enough to install them in the first place), you're better off editing the registry and killing all the dll's, so that none of those load either. There's plenty of startup programs that don't show themselves in the startup folder anyway (like the bits of Creative and RealPlayer designed to spy on you) which you'll only ever see by being thorough with your task manager and vigilant with the registry.