[WIN7] Reducing size impact for x64 Ultimate

[Kickdruminertia]

I've tried searching both here and in the backup and storage forum, and I couldn't find anything specifically addressing it, but it must be a common issue so please direct me elsewhere if its already been well covered;

I'm running win7 ultimate on a new vertex 2 SSD install, and while most things are running terrifically, I'm having trouble with the kind of greed for space windows is showing- I have 46.3 gig to play with, and I think windows is taking between a quarter and a third of that. I've done the obvious things, System restore is turned off, the pagefile is still there but is not immodest in size, and I try to keep installs, optional extras and so on as minimal as possible. Drive indexing however, is giving me grief; when I disabled it, it would not allow file searching at all which is unacceptable, and when i have re-enabled it on every drive but the SSD, it is taking up 8 gigs of space to create the indexes for every other drive, which is excessive to say the least. I could de-index a couple of drives but really, I'm thinking there should be a lot of features and content that I won't need, and 15-20 gigs is far too huge a footprint size for an OS anyway.

So, my question ultimately is this: What steps, programs or other measures can I take to strip away the excess fat from a windows x64 ultimate install, without compromising stability, integrity and so on? There has to be a better way than surrendering the Lion's share of my space before I've even started installing my own content!

TL;DR- How Make Win7 Sleek Without Make Crash?

[Tenoq]

You could use symlinks to move some files (users folder, for example) to another drive.

I have no idea how your index is so large - you're obviously indexing files you shouldn't be and are no doubt crippling the performance of your PC for no real gain (IMO). My index is under 100MB with default settings.

Alternately... bigger SSD? My Windows folder is 12GB on a fairly mature install of x64 - that doesn't seem that big to me (at least compared to Vista).

[the scotsman]

You should still be able to search with indexing turned off...there's something wrong there.

[Kickdruminertia]

Originally Posted by Tenoq

You could use symlinks to move some files (users folder, for example) to another drive.

I have no idea how your index is so large - you're obviously indexing files you shouldn't be and are no doubt crippling the performance of your PC for no real gain (IMO). My index is under 100MB with default settings.

Alternately... bigger SSD? My Windows folder is 12GB on a fairly mature install of x64 - that doesn't seem that big to me (at least compared to Vista).

I'm looking into the first two, but I really don't want to buy another SSD, this is already my 2nd, and with luck I may be successful getting the first dodgy OCZ corev2 RMA'd, which might give me credits towards another vertex 2 I could raid with this one.

On a different tack, does anyone know what kind of material is installed into windows/winsxs ? I've got literally 6291 folders with the prefix AMD64_ totalling 3.7 gigs, and yet this system never has nor will run an AMD64 chip. Might it be possible to kill some or all of this, or is it merely misleading folder indexes of actually vital content?

Edit: "AMD64 is just the common name for the 64bit architecture introduced by AMD which was then adopted by Intel. So AMD64 is for the 64bit versions of the DLLs."

As far as I can tell the entire side by side directory is quite inefficient, can't be cleaned by disk cleanup, there is no tool for it, and any user intervention is fraught by peril. What a crock of shit.

Also I think I can get 3 gigs back from killing hibernation. Need to restart to see if I've been successful. I manually moved the massive index files onto another partition for testing and I can still search, but have not restarted yet. That's 10 or so gigs liberated if successful, hopefully I can get more. Currently 13.4 gig free on C:/
Edit 2: O lord, all it took was a restart and I'm back down to 9.47 gig free again. This is going to be harder than I thought.

[Kickdruminertia]

Does anyone think I should reduce my pagefile size down from 4 gig? I'm running i5750 @ 4.0/200 BCLK with 4gig DDR3 @ 1600mhz CL9, 2x5870 CF for reference, how much is pagefile size likely to affect performance on such a fast SSD/system? I'm leaning towards a custom size of 1.5 gig now but I'm sure some of you have a much better idea than I.

Ok, hibernation successfully killed this time, back to 12.3 gigs free.

Oh windows7, you so obese.

[Matt_NZ]

I'm assuming you have a secondary HDD? You can move the index location to a different HDD if you want the indexing but don't want it eating up your space on your SSD.