Reclaiming disk space on Windows [closed]

Solution 1:

WinDirStat

I like WinDirStat, a free (open source) tool that scans the file system and visually presents statistics about your files. You can use this to determine which files are the largest, where is everything located, etc.

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From the site:

WinDirStat reads the whole directory tree once and then presents it in three useful views:

The directory list, which resembles the tree view of the Windows Explorer but is sorted by file/subtree size,

The treemap, which shows the whole contents of the directory tree straight away,

The extension list, which serves as a legend and shows statistics about the file types.

Solution 2:

System Restore Points

A Windows system creates System Restore points and the default configuration allows a lot of space to be reserved for these restore points. When you know that the system is not going to need 'uninstalls' (meaning, everything you recently installed is working fine) you can delete all but the most recent restore point.

This can be done from

the "Free up space on your hard disk" option in
- Control Panel,
  - Performance and Maintenance

Its quite deep and usually missed out.

Recycle Bin

The Recycle Bin usually defaults to 10% of your disk partition (for each partition).
For a 100GB drive, this becomes 10GB reserved for recycle bin.

you can reduce the default to a lower value more useful for your setup
you can also choose to configure recycle storage individually for each partition

I also use this short cut to clean the recycle bin once in a while,

%windir%\system32\cleanmgr.exe /D

Uninstall Folders

Deleting Uninstall Folders.
Already mentioned in another answer here.
There is a script reference here.

Tested on Windows XP, Requires WScript and VBScript (which would be with most Windows OS)

RevoUninstaller

RevoUninstaller is a good freeware to cleanup stray files left around by application uninstalls. It does a pretty neat scan for files hanging around from a rough uninstall.
I also like CCleaner mentioned in another answer here.