Thinkpads Forum

I am running Windows XP Service Pack 3. I am very low on hard drive space. I have 7.80 gb of space left. The hard drive has 69.gb total. I cannot figure out what else to possibly delete. What can I do to regain space? Are there any programs that come preinstalled on Thinkpads that take up a lot of space and are better off deleted?

Me2 wrote:I am running Windows XP Service Pack 3. I am very low on hard drive space. I have 7.80 gb of space left. The hard drive has 69.gb total. I cannot figure out what else to possibly delete. What can I do to regain space? Are there any programs that come preinstalled on Thinkpads that take up a lot of space and are better off deleted?

XP leaves a whole lot of extra files on your drive after installing service packs. You can get rid of around a half gig by deleting them. For starters, Google around for:

"delete old xp service pack files"

Also, clear out any Temp folders such as C:\Windows\Temp, etc.

That will get you started.

With all the service packs and patches and things, poor old XP has become seriously bloated.

You can also delete all the subdirectories in C:\Windows that begin with "$NtUninstall..."
These contain the 'old' files from Windows updates. They take up humongous space as well.

Sometimes large log files are created. It can be useful to search for all files over a certain size - perhaps 100MB.

Also is there a program like Microsoft Digital Image Standard 2006 that takes up less space? And is CCleaner a good program to use or not?

Not sure about those last two questions but you can also recover some disk space by deleting the older system restore checkpoints. If you are sure that your system is working normally and can afford to lose all of the previous restore points, then this is what I do:

- run the System utility from Control Panel (alternate method: right-click the My Computer icon on the desktop/Start Menu)
- click the System Restore tab
- check the box "Turn off System Restore"
- click the "Apply" button; this will delete all of the accumulated restore points so....
- a pop-up confirmation box appears; click the "Yes" button to continue with the deletion - it can take a few seconds to finish
- uncheck the "Turn off System Restore" box
- you can also move the slider and adjust the amount of disk space you reserve for future checkpoints
- click the "Apply" button again; it will take a few seconds to return control to the System window as a restore point is being created
- close the System window

If you want to keep the most recent restore points, then just move the slider bar to a lower setting (say 400MB), click Apply, then move the slider back to where you want it, and click Apply once more.

I cannot seem to find an easy way to delete the old xp service pack files. Everything I found seems more complicated than I would like. Maybe I didn't look long enough?

Look at the following 2 links...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/329260

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956324