OT: PC Cleanup

AgentZero · #1 November 29th, 2005, 06:50 PM

I swear, one of these days I'll post on-topic. Really! Anyway, I'm just doing a bit of maintenance on my computer to keep it running nicely until I get employed & am able to dump my money into a new one. At the moment, I've got Windows on a seperate partition, but that partition's starting to get a little clogged. I've identifed the two main culprits: Program Files and Application Data in the Documents and Settings folders, the latter being the worse of the two. And I'm just wondering, is there anything really important in Application Data, or could I just nuke the whole thing to free up some space?

Also, does anyone know if there's a way to have the Windows program itself on one drive, but have Documents & Settings and Program files on a different drive?

Edit: And what exactly does Pagefile.sys do? I was under the impression that it's the Windows swap file, but I've just noticed I've got one one each partition. What's going on there?

Slynky · #2 November 29th, 2005, 07:12 PM

One potentially big fill in Application Data would be your Outlook file if you use that for your mail handler.

AgentZero · #3 November 29th, 2005, 07:26 PM

Nope, Thunderbird. It's not any one really big folder, it's just lots of smaller ones. Although I did just free up 4GB by deleting the Valve folder, since apparently Steam doesn't uninstall with Half-Life 2. For shame...

El_Phil · #4 November 29th, 2005, 08:20 PM

As I recall TweakUI used to have an option for (re)locating various windows folders. Not sure how useful that is, all fairly small folders I think.

I do know XP can relocate an entire profile allegedly, never tried it myself. Control Panel, System, Advanced tab, user profiles, settings button. There's an option there to copy profiles to somewhere else. Do that, log on to your copied profile and then delete the old one. Should work and I can't see why not but as I said I've never tried it.

You could also try the file and settings transfer wizard, but I'm not sure if there's an option to decide where you place the profile.

Fyron · #5 November 29th, 2005, 11:19 PM

TweakUI is the answer.

* Install it (a "power toy" from MS site for XP), boot into safe mode.
* Show hidden and system files in Folder Options.
* Copy the entire Program Files folder to the D drive (or whatever the second partition is).
* Run TweakUI and change the location of Program Files and Common Program Files over to the copy on the D drive (Common Program Files is a sub folder of Program Files, aka C:\Program Files\Common Files).
* Reboot the PC.

You should be good to go and safe to delete C:\Program Files. You can move all sorts of system folders around like this. I regularly do it for start menu, documents and desktop folders.

=0=

Windows creates a page file on every drive. Performance is improved by having the page file on a different disk from Windows, so it is probably trying to optimize. Since these are the same physical disk, there is no net speedup, so it is safe to disable the page file on D partition in System Properties > Advanced > Performance.