While I gladly finished my Windows development detour a while ago, it can’t hurt to share some stuff. It always puzzled me how fast gigabytes of disk space disappear through ordinary Windows usage as a developer. So here’s my non-exhaustive list of places to reclaim disk space:
Temp folders
Windows has plenty of them. In fact, each one surpasses the size of my Linux root file system 🙂 Let’s start simple:
- C:\Users\$USER\AppData\Local\Temp
Office caches (mostly Lync data and random crap):
- C:\Users\$USER\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Office\
- C:\MSOCache
Whatever that is:
- C:\ProgramData\Package Cache
SQL Server also has an update cache too:
- C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\110\Setup Bootstrap
Don’t forget the System Center Configuration Manager Cache. That’s the thing that your sysadmin fills for you :
- C:\Windows\ccmcache
Windows Installer Cache
This one can grow really fast.
- C:\Windows\Installer
However, you shouldn’t touch that manually. Otherwise all hell may break loose. Instead, use the official Windows Installer Cleanup Utility (deprecated but still usefull)or it’s successor Microsoft FixIt.
TFS-Mappings
In case you still rely on Team Foundation Server, regularly check your mapping folders. Build artifacts tend to pile up there even after removing branches, etc.
Resharper Cache
Visual Studio is useless without, so you’re likely using it too. I was unable to configure the cache size but you can safely delete it once in a while:
C:\Users\$USER\AppData\Local\JetBrains\ReSharper\$VERSION\SolutionCaches
.NET Caches
As with all serious software on Windows, the .NET framework has caches too. Depending on which version you care for (choose between 32bit and 64bit) you may exercise your delete keys in subfolders of:
- C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework
- C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64
As an example, drop these for .NET-4.5-something:
- C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\SetupCache
- C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\Temporary ASP.NET Files
The pagefile
Yes, a classic! Windows loves to have a big pagefile because it always tries to get as many dirty pages on disks as possible. So in my case it had a (Windows-managed) size of 17GB. Feels like quite a lot. So depending on personal taste you may want to adjust this here:
Suspend to disk
As expected, suspend to disk needs space too. Windows uses a dedicated file, usually around the size of your built in RAM:
- C:\hiberfil.sys
If Suspend to RAM is good enough for you, you may want to disable it. Open up cmd.exe and issue “powercfg -H off“:
TL;DR
With these rather simple measures, I managed to reclaim around 40GB on a Workstation at work. This can make quite a difference if you’re on a small-ish SSD.
