How organised is your menu system?

[Burgerman]

I am very nerd/ocd wih mine.

Heres a couple of laptop screenshots.

Desktop and menus. Obviously you can scroll down a lot too. The stuff you cant see is exactly te same level of ocd.

[Arima]

Don't organize much of anything. Programs usually go in "Programs Files" folder. Documents folder gets any saved documents. Downloads go in the Download folder.

Made a image using macrium over the weekend. 250gb. Wondering why it's so big? Running Windows 10 Pro. How many versions of Microsoft C+ do I need?

[Burgerman]

All of them.

250GB?

Mines 100. And that includes 25GB of stuff in my docs, every installable program under the sun and many are 7 or more GB, and so you are definitely doing something strange.

Or you allowed windows to drive you. Instead of the other way around.

Run DISK CLEANUP and tick the systems files at the bottom. Then tick EVERY TICK BOX. It will take a week to run. Then tell me how big?

Turn of SYSTEM RESTORE and delete all the previous stuff thats in it. Thats usually huge. I dont use it at all.

Then tell me how much?

Make sure you unistall all previous windows update packages as those can be 50GB.

And run this:
(make desktop folder. Put the folder and files in this zip into it.)
Run it. Click the big box on the right CLEANMGR+ .
Open the settings (top right) tell it to run as administrator always. Then tick EVERY BOX on both tabs. Finally choose CLEANUP button. It will take forever but it hasnt frozen. Wait!
Then tell me how big?

[Burgerman]

Be SURE to tick this before cleanup and go for a walk...

[Arima]

Think I'm making some progress. After Disk Cleanup

After System Restore.

Clean Manager arguing with me.

I'll mess with more tomorrow.

[Burgerman]

You see that unalocated 30GB? Use it!
Right click on your windows partition, choose extend partition... As big as it allows. It will expand and use up the unallocated wasted space and give you a 30GB bigger C drive.

Also, if you do backups, with say Macrium. You can DELETE that 1000MB partition, and expand the storage drive by another 1000MB.

And turn off restore completely. And delete the used space to zero!

And then you can delete a bunch of other stuff...
Such as TURN OFF hybernation. Turn off SWAP FILE. TURN OFF SLEEP. Then delete the 3 now unused huge files in the root of your C drive.

In fact be sure you turned on the options to SEE:
System files.
File extentions.
Hidden files etc.

As I always do. Then you can DELETE every file in your C drive other than the ones remaining in my image below. Those are all that NEEDS to be there. The rest are all remnants of past events or old stores, old driver work spaces or install program remains etc.

With every hidden file in view it SHOULD look like this!

[Burgerman]

Then go to your user folder and open all of these.
Delete everything you do not want from the downloads and other folders.
I go one further I delete all the folders I dont use as its faster.

From this:
If you have anything MORE than this, delete it!


To this:

[Burgerman]

Then...
C:\Windows\Downloaded Program Files

Delete the contents of this...
Do the same with downloaded program files in your windows folder. And redistrubutable files.

By now you should be getting the idea...
Windows stores crap loads of uneeded and space wasting copies of everything and it can double the size of your windows istallation.

[daveonwheels]

what i do, is i never install that many programs!

[Burgerman]

You dont have to because windows itself does about three quarters of it.

But if you dont have many programs then what do you use your computer for?

[daveonwheels]

gaming. photo editing. thats about it. and i only run 2 games

[Burgerman]

For photo editing I use:
Adobe Photoshop 2024 beta with a few AI bits in it.
I also use Adobe RAW.
I also use Adobe Bridge.
And Adobe Lightroom.
I mainly use Corel Paint Shop Pro 2023 for photo editing though as I work faster...
I almost always use DXO PhotoLab 6.9, with its amazing AI noise reduction and sharpening capability for RAW files.
I sometimes use the Nikon NX software for RAW.
I Also use DXO 4 Viewpoint for perspective correction stuff. Also quite good!
I also use Adobe Digital Negative DNG converter.
I use SnapClear to remove backgrounds as if by magic with 1 click...
When adding images to movies I use Corel Movie Editor Visual Studio 2022.
Also use Adobe Premier 2023 for general movie editing.
And Cyberlink Power Director 21. Trying to figure out which is better...
I use Photomatrix 7.X for HDR creation.
And I use Adobe Illustrator 2023 at times, but its not very intuitive.

[Burgerman]

I only run 1 game. MS flight Sim. Its taking up 292GB on drive D. It is rediculous!

[Burgerman]

You can also safely delete the contents of this folder:

C:\Users\Burgerman\AppData\Local\Downloaded Installations

Where burgerman is your usernale obviously...
This can be huge on some machines.