Trimming the fat from thinkpad Windows 7 installs.

[manamana]

Still in the process of setting up my new w510 - one of the first things I did was yank the stock HD and drop in a 120GB sand force SSD.

Which formats out to 111 GB.

And now has the windows 7 pro x64 + thinkpad apps sitting on it, taking up a solid 35GB.

that seems...high.

I assume there's alot of needless junk in there, but I'm not finding much - mostly because there's around 18 GB I can't account for in any of the C: drive folders.

Where should I start when trying to pare this down?

Edit: down to 16 total GB by trimming down the page file (now 1GB min, 12 GB max) and disabling hibernation (hiberfil.sys was 10GB!)

[crashnburn]

Still in the process of setting up my new w510 - one of the first things I did was yank the stock HD and drop in a 120GB sand force SSD.

Which formats out to 111 GB.

And now has the windows 7 pro x64 + thinkpad apps sitting on it, taking up a solid 35GB.

that seems...high.

I assume there's alot of needless junk in there, but I'm not finding much - mostly because there's around 18 GB I can't account for in any of the C: drive folders.

Where should I start when trying to pare this down?

Edit: down to 16 total GB by trimming down the page file (now 1GB min, 12 GB max) and disabling hibernation (hiberfil.sys was 10GB!)

Interesting. Need to do the same PS: 16GB page file / 10 GB Hiber..? Wow! How much RAM you running?

[ashleys]

Still 16GB
I have some sympathy with trying to remove unwanted applications. Thankfully my ThinkPads are now running with retail Windows 7 (upgrade) and I just used System Update 4.0 to install the Thinkpad applications I actually needed, which were very few.
From what you say, it sounds like there's still a load of stuff included in the Lenovo install. I suppose you could start with things like EasyEject, ThinkPad toolbox, Rescue & Recovery (I'd recommend another backup solution rather than R&R). As I don't have a Lenovo install anymore, I'm not sure what else they include now, sorry.

[crashnburn]

Still 16GB
I have some sympathy with trying to remove unwanted applications. Thankfully my ThinkPads are now running with retail Windows 7 (upgrade) and I just used System Update 4.0 to install the Thinkpad applications I actually needed, which were very few.
From what you say, it sounds like there's still a load of stuff included in the Lenovo install. I suppose you could start with things like EasyEject, ThinkPad toolbox, Rescue & Recovery (I'd recommend another backup solution rather than R&R). As I don't have a Lenovo install anymore, I'm not sure what else they include now, sorry.

Nice. Please do outline the ones you installed. I cant do without Access Connections.. What about you? which ones?

[ashleys]

I'll need to get home to check ... I'll post back later.

[AMATX]

Hidden/recovery partitions, perhaps?

[ashleys]

Windows 7 systems installed from retail disc and using System Update 4.0 to install ThinkPad software, as follows,

T30
Power manager driver - installed
UltraNav driver - installed
Battery maximiser - installed (by hand)

T60
Power Manager driver - installed
UltraNav Driver - installed
Intel Wireless WiFi for Windows 7 - installed
HotKey features package - installed
Power manager - installed
Lenovo System interface driver - installed
Intel Matrix Storage driver - installed
Active protection System - installed

Both Fingerprint reader and Access Connections show as available for installation on the T60 but I haven't installed them.

Both machines function perfectly and use roughly about 14GB on the system volume. However, 4.5GB of that is the hiberfile, pagefile and system restore points.

The single biggest reason I have for not installing unwanted software is the waste of time spent backing them up.
I do weekly backups of my systems OS partition, so factored over a year, that's a lot of wasted time backing up data I don't need.

[manamana]

I decided that getting it around 15 GB including a minor page file was probably good enough. I've disable hibernation and system restore (I use ghost for backups)

12GB ram. seems to have been the big culprit, causing the huge hiberfil.sys and page file to be big as well.

After installing CS5 and all my misc apps, install takes up ~25 GB. could probably do a bit better but that's good enough to leave some space for the OS to grow and still have a 60GB projects partition.

Problem I'm working on at the moment is how to disable fn+f12 (hibernate). if you hit it, the [censored] hiberfil.sys gets recreated - I would like to avoid the potential of doing that accidentally.

[Marin85]

Also, check System Properties -> System Protection -> Configure, in order to adjust the disk space available to system protection. With default settings, it can easily eat up tons of GBs in shadow copies, restore points etc. before one has even noticed what is going on...

There is something like ThinkPad keyboard customization utility. With this, you might be able to customize/disable Fn+... shortcuts. Also, pressing Fn+F12 accidentally is something rare in my experience

[Raist17]

I recently acquired a T43 with the following specs:
-1.5 gigs of RAM
-40 gb hard drive
-1.87 GHz processor
-came wiped with Win XP installed, I immediately did a clean install of Win 7 32-bit

My question is, my hard drive has 20 GB used, what files are ok for me to delete and which do I need to keep? I have no interest in returning to XP so can I delete the folders labeled Windows.old? What else can I remove to recover some hard disk space?

Thanks!

[topmahof]

if you used an upgrade version of win7 you might need windows.old in there being that the upgrade has to be installed over an existing os. if you get rid of windows.old you might have to reinstall xp in order to reinstall win7 upgrade if you ever have to to a reinstall. you could probably open windows.old and get rid of old programs and pictures as long as you don't do anything with windows.

[Radioguy]

As for trimming down within Win7, this has been a long time go-to site for Win installs:

http://www.blackviper.com/

[eyeland]

I usually follow the suggestions given by BlackViper and I gathered 15 services that can be disabled in a batchfile to avoid having to go through the list everytime I do an install.
Reading up on the whole "enhanced experience" subject however, got me thinking that perhaps a modified version of the blackviper lists could be generated for specific thinkpads? From what I can gather, the main performance boost (if any at all) in EE as compared to a "stock windows" comes from tweaks in relation to drivers, services and registry. Perhaps someone with an EE system would like to do a 2. install on another disk or partition and look around for any differences?
Perhaps I should start a dedicated thread where we can share experiences on how to trim a fresh install in conjuction with different systems/devices, both in regards to HD space and performance/loadtimes unless one such thread already exists?
Cheers
Rune
EDIT: just found the "Custom Services Registry File" generator on blackviper making it even easier to apply several tweaks at once

[crashnburn]

I usually follow the suggestions given by BlackViper and I gathered 15 services that can be disabled in a batchfile to avoid having to go through the list everytime I do an install.
Reading up on the whole "enhanced experience" subject however, got me thinking that perhaps a modified version of the blackviper lists could be generated for specific thinkpads? From what I can gather, the main performance boost (if any at all) in EE as compared to a "stock windows" comes from tweaks in relation to drivers, services and registry. Perhaps someone with an EE system would like to do a 2. install on another disk or partition and look around for any differences?
Perhaps I should start a dedicated thread where we can share experiences on how to trim a fresh install in conjuction with different systems/devices, both in regards to HD space and performance/loadtimes unless one such thread already exists?
Cheers
Rune
EDIT: just found the "Custom Services Registry File" generator on blackviper making it even easier to apply several tweaks at once

Do share such batch files with us.. PS: Any updates to your optimizations?

RT Se7en Lite Windows 7 Configuration Tool
http://www.rt7lite.com/

Has anyone here used / been using RT Seven Lite (Rt7lite) to streamline, lean down and customize their Windows 7 installation on their Thinkpads?

Any suggestions on which
- Services (MS Windows 7) to not install / avoid / disable? (via RT7Lite ??)

- Drivers (MS default or Lenovo ones)
- Apps (ThinkVantage etc)

(to install via System Update)

...to install / remove / leave out?

[pjk]

On a recent T520 setup, I discovered that the Lenovo Win7-x64 preload has tons of software on the C: partition that I had no interest in using.

From memory (because I don't have that machine handy right now), they were under typical Lenovo folders named something like C:\SWUTILS or C:\DRIVERS, and included stuff like:

Norton AV
Adobe Reader (out of date version)
Various multimedia apps
Rescue and Recovery (which is huge but I might use it so didn't delete it)

I'll have to double-check the whole list when I have the machine at hand.

I just leave the original parent folders there for context, and remove the contents. (I also typically document such changes in a system changelog so if I'm scratching my head later about why something is acting strangely I can refresh my memory on what I removed)