UPDATED: Oct 2009 - Updated items are marked with (NEW)

This question seems to get asked again and again, so here is a thorough list of actions you can take to clean up your C: drive.

Let me know if there are any mistakes, oversights or anything that could be added. I attempted to only list procedures that produce substantial gains in free space. Thanks to everyone whose suggestions have been incorporated.

*As an alternative to deleting any of these folders mentioned below, you can move them to another location and create a junction point to them instead. Read "A few other tips" below for an explanation of how to do this. This would be particularly useful in case of the "C:\windows\installer" folder.

Asus has released "Eee PC Shrinker". It's simple, and I recommend using it. You can obtain it here:
http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/EeePC/ … rinker.zip
http://dlsvr04.asus.com/pub/ASUS/EeePC/ … rinker.zip
If these download links are broken try looking for it on the Asus website in Eee downloads.

Here's the main list of procedures for cleaning up space on your C: drive. If you bought a 901 with XP pre-installed some of these steps will have already been done for you. Also, Eee PC Shrinker performs some of these tasks.

1. Go to add/remove programs in the control panel and remove anything you don’t want. Also click on add/remove windows components and remove anything you don’t want.

2. Turn off the paging file (if it's not already off). Right click on my computer in the start menu, click properties, click the advanced tab, click settings under performance, click the advanced tab, click change under virtual memory, click no paging file and click set.

3. Turn off system restore. Right click on my computer in the start menu, click properties and click the system restore tab.

4. Turn off hibernation (if it's not already off). Control panel->Power Options->hibernate tab

5. Delete anything in your profile temp directory (note that it's a hidden folder) and your windows temp directory. If you get an error deleting certain files just skip them.
C:\Documents and Settings\[profile name]\Local Settings\Temp
C:\WINDOWS\Temp

6. Delete anything in the ServicePackFiles folder. These will only exist if you installed a service pack after installing windows. This will prevent you from uninstalling the service pack.
C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles

7. Run CCleaner. This is a free utility that will help clean up various temp/log/cache files. In CCleaner under advanced you can set it to remove any hotfix uninstallers, which I recommend.
http://www.ccleaner.com/download/builds … ading-slim

8. You should probably have enough space now, but if you would like more then I suggest cleaning out the dll cache folder.
Type the following at a command line window:
“sfc /purgecache”
If you’re not sure how to open a command line window: start menu->run->type “cmd” and click ok
If you want to understand what clearing the dll cache actually does then read the following first:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_file_protection
~150 MB
Note: rjstep3 has suggested moving the dllcache folder and changing a registry setting so that Windows knows where to find it. If this solution appeals to you more, you can find his instructions here: http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=40305

9. Asus released a utility that essentially makes all programs installed to "C:\program files" reside on the D: drive. Some people have reported having problems with the utility, so I suggest reading the short manual for it carefully and only doing it if you've got to this point and still need more space. I suggest running CheckDisk on both your C: and D: drive before using the utility; I'm speculating that file system errors may be causing some of people's problems with the utility. The current version of the utility is version 3, so it's possible that some bugs in the earlier versions were causing some of the problems.
AutoC2D can be downloaded here:
http://dlsvr.asus.com/pub/ASUS/EeePC/Ee … oC2D_3.zip

10. Delete all files used for windows updates. I suggest running Microsoft update first to make sure everything is updated (http://update.microsoft.com). After deleting these folders, if you run Microsoft Update manually it will re-download any deleted files needed to perform the updates (so this is safe).
-In the control panel under automatic updates turn off automatic updates.
-Stop the automatic update service—right click on my computer in the start menu and click manage, click services and application, click services, on the right pane right click on automatic updates and click stop.
-Delete the following two folders including all contents:
C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\DataStore
C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\Download

11. This NOT recommended unless you know what you're doing and feel it's worth it. Delete all files in Windows’s driver cache folder. If you delete it you'll have to provide the driver for anything new (there will be no "windows drivers" to search through).
C:\WINDOWS\Driver Cache\i386
~80 MB

12. Again, NOT recommended. Uninstaller files can take up a lot of space—613MB on my 901 as I type this. You can completely delete the folder containing the uninstaller information, but you will obviously not be able to automatically uninstall anything after doing this. However, one trick to automatically uninstalling a program after removing the uninstall data is to install it again over top and then uninstall it (but this doesn't always work).
To remove the uninstaller info delete all files in the following folder:
C:\Windows\Installer
Alternatively, there is a Microsoft program that will allow you to selectively remove uninstallers. Unfortunately it doesn’t show you how much space each uninstaller takes up, but you can go to the installer directory, sort it by size, right click on the largest files and click properties, and by examining the properties tab you can usually figure out what the uninstaller is for (maybe there’s an easier way of doing that that I’m not aware of).
Here is the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility, which will delete the uninstaller files for a specific uninstall:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.as … -us;290301
~500 MB

A few other tips:

(NEW) I highly recommend that you avoid installing any versions of Microsoft .NET. It takes up a lot of space and any .NET program will usually have a suitable replacement. If you have installed .NET you can uninstall all versions and hide it from Microsoft Update to avoid installing it again in the future.

Run windows CheckDisk. Filesystem errors can sometimes cause free space to be incorrectly calculated.
Go to My Computer, right click on the C: drive, click properties, click tools, click check now, tick "automatically fix filesystem errors", do not tick the second box, and then click start. It should prompt you to reboot the computer.

Instead of deleting any of these folders you could move them to your D: drive and create a junction point that points to the new location.
For example, if you wanted to move the "C:\windows\installer" directory to "D:\installer" you would just need to do this:
-First you need a utility that will create junction points. I'll use "Junction Link Magic" for this example, which you can get here: http://www.rekenwonder.com/linkmagic.htm
-Download and install Junction Link Magic
-Copy the "C:\windows\installer" folder to "D:\installer"
-Rename "C:\windows\installer" to "C:\windows\installer-old"
-Create an empty "C:\windows\installer" folder
-Run Junction Link Magic (and cancel the scanning), click create, set the junction point to "C:\windows\installer" and the destination folder to "D:\installer"
-Now double check that going into "C:\windows\installer" shows all your installer files
-If it looks good then you can delete the "c:\windows\installer-old" folder
*Note that if you want to remove the junction you will have to use Junction Link Magic (or another junction utility). If you delete "C:\windows\installer" without removing the junction first you'll delete all the contents.

If you're using Internet Explorer you should set the disk cache to something reasonable like 50 MB, as the default is very large. Tools->Internet Options->Browsing History Settings

If your "My Documents" folder is expected to get large, or already is, you may want to move your "My Documents" folder to the D: drive. If so, here’s how.
Right click on "My Documents" in the start menu, click properties, click on Find Target to find your new folder location and then click Move.

If you want to move any of your other special folders such as the desktop folder to another drive you can do this easily using tweakui, which is a free utility from Microsoft.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/ … ySetup.exe
In TweakUI it's under My Computer->Special Folders

There’s a free program called WinDirStat which graphically shows how much space different files and folders are taking up. It’s probably not very useful for a fresh install, but could be useful later on.
http://windirstat.info/
Another option is SpaceMonger (it's nagware):
http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/

EXPERIMENTAL: I haven't given the following a lot of testing, but they seem to work fine. If they cause any problems please let me know.

(NEW) If you installed IE 8 then it seems to be safe to delete the following folders:
C:\Windows\ie7
C:\Windows\ie7updates

(NEW) If you have decided to uninstall all versions of .NET it appears to be safe to delete the following folders:
C:\Program Files\Microsoft.NET
C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET
C:\WINDOWS\assembly
Note that you may need to boot from another bootable media to delete the two folders in the Windows directory or use file/folder deletion software such as MoveOnBoot. (feel free to offer other tricks if there's something easier).

When you update your version of Sun Java make sure you uninstall all the older versions first.

Sun Java has a cache that defaults to 1 GB. I suggest setting this to 50 MB (Note that CCleaner cleans out the Java cache).
Control panel->Java->Settings
If you have any folders other then "jre6" in the following folder you can delete them (this assumes that java 6 is the version you have installed and is the latest version).
C:\Program Files\Java

Delete the Adobe reader setup files:
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Setup Files
If you've upgraded to Reader 9 then you can delete any remnants of Reader 8 after you've uninstalled it:
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 8.0
These two steps freed up about 150 megs on my Eee.

Here's a short list of programs that are small in size, and may be suitable replacements for what you currently use.
Sizes are download sizes and not disk space used.

PDF Reader - (4 MB) Foxit Reader http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/download.php

CD/DVD Writing - (3 MB) CDBurnerXP http://cdburnerxp.se/en/download

Office Software, Email, Calendar - (0 MB) Google Apps OR Zoho Office Suite

Media Player - (6 MB) http://www.gomlab.com/eng/GMP_download.html
GOM takes up much less space than VLC!
*NOTE* hit cancel at the end of installation if you don't want the ASK toolbar

Simple Cloud-Based Backup/Synchronication - (14 MB) Dropbox http://www.getdropbox.com/
This isn't that small but very useful, so I figure it's worth mentioning. It easily syncs files between your Eee and other computers.

Last edited by Jasked (2009-10-16 4:24:37 pm)