disk cleanup does not do its job

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windows 7 takes more and more space from my boot partition. yesterday i uninstalled several programs to free some space. disk cleanup only found ~500 mb to clean. c: had 123 gb free diskspace after that.

today, after a reboot, only 120 gb free space left on c: –  where did these 3 gb go? according to treesize free windows folder takes 55,9 gb diskspace in total. there is winsxs folder, 18,7 (!) gb huge. installer folder takes 9,9 gb. system32 takes 9,7 gb and temp is eating 5,1 gb although i already cleaned up %temp%.

on c: (root) system volume information eats 11,9 gb, msocache takes 750 mb.

running disk cleanup again shows 0 kb to cleanup, even if i click on button for cleaning up system files. so what can i do instead of disk cleanup? why does winsxs have to be ~20 gb huge? and why is there still 5 gb in temp folder after deleting everything in %temp%? and do i really need msocache? i’m not going to uninstall office 2010.

every diskspace eater else belongs programdata, progam files (installed application) and users.

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Check out %temp% in Start command, hit enter. This should take you to your Temp Folder in 7. All these files can be dumped, deleted. Don’t take my word for it, check out “How To Manually Clean Out The Temp Folder In Windows 7”

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%temp% should work in all WinOS versions. See pcworld.com article.

While older, this article from Woody has a helpful list of why’s and wherefore’s of Disk Cleanup options.

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if i type %temp% this is empty already, as i said i cleaned that already. but there is a temp folder in windows folder (c:\windows\temp) which has >5 gb! and according to disk cleanup from windows explorer, there is nothing more to clean up (0 kb), also if i click on button for cleanup system files.

but still there is >5 gb in windows\temp and >18 gb in winsxs… and how can a partition shrink from 123 gb free space to 120 gb (3 gb!!!) in one single reboot? i don’t get it.

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There are two articles on this site about Windows log file compression bug. It has been known to fill up the HDD. These may help you.

Long-standing bug in Win7 log file compression

and

A question about Win7 log file compression

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c:\windows\lob\cbs folder the article refers to is not that big in my case. its size is less than 1 gb. files beginning with cab_ in c:\windows\temp take 4,83 gb so i’ll delete these. still left c:\windows\winsxs consuming >18 gb.

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@Kirsty:

This question is not exactly about what is being discussed here, however I keep seeing references to “WU Hide/Show”, and don’t have a clue as to what “tool” this is supposed to be for the users.   This is probably way over my head since I’m not computer literate.  Just trying to determine if this is something that would be beneficial.   Thank you for any help you may be able to provide, and for all of the other good information you always have.   It’s great!    

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What is the WINSXS directory in Windows 2008 and Windows Vista and why is it so large?

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…disk cleanup only found ~500 mb to clean. c: had 123 gb free diskspace after that.today, after a reboot, only 120 gb free space left on c: –  where did these 3 gb go?…

The 3 gig difference is probably your “pagefile.sys” file,which is a running cache file to help Windows operate. It’s installed on ALL systems, and is a core part of the Windows Operating System, so please don’t try to delete it.

My pagefile size is currently just shy of 4 gigs on a Windows 7 SP1 x64 system with 4 gigs of memory installed and running on a 120 gig solid state drive. The solid state drive is the only drive in the computer.

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anonymous wrote:

please don’t try to delete it

A pagefile can have a maximum size set – historic settings formula work on a RAM comparison, so if you had 24GB RAM on a 120GB SSD, you were crippling a large amount of your drive if you didn’t alter the setting (I found this out myself).

See here and here for further information. Old working limits supported were around 4+GB.

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Kirsty, as you mentioned Nick Rintalan’s Citrix blog, here is another recent tool from Citrix which may be of interest to those more advanced in tweaking Windows.
https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX224676
https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2017/12/05/citrix-optimizer/
Those interested in downloading it might need a Citrix user account which is free and allows access to all sort of other advanced information from Citrix.
The Citrix Optimizer tool is intended to be used on VDIs, but it won’t harm to be selectively used on physical machines too.

1 user thanked author for this post.

PKCano

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@Kirsty-

That’s my post up there, #164551. I was posting anonymously due to using a borrowed computer. On my wife’s computer, the one I referenced in the note above, I let Windows manage the page file so I don’t have to get grey hairs doing so myself. With 4 gigs of RAM, its historical size has been around 4 gigs. On my computer with Win 7 SP1 and 4 gigs of RAM along with a 500 gig spinning hard drive, the page file is still just a skosh over 4 gigs in size as I write this, again with Windows managing the file’s size.

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Way back when (when I was concerned with pagefiles, Win95/97/ME/2000 maybe as far as XP) the rule of thumb if you were managing it was 1.5 x RAM size. But if you were having memory problems you could adjust upward.

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BobbyB

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@ anonymous #163998

Did you cleanup extra System Restore points, ie you only need to keep the most recent SR point.?
https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/5482/make-system-restore-use-less-space-in-windows-7/
.
https://www.wikihow.com/Free-up-Disk-Space-(Windows-7)

One SR point = a few GB. SR points are like system images.
___ Windows will often auto-create a SR point before downloading/installing important updates. The built-in SR program can show you the SR points created.

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anonymous wrote:

windows 7 takes more and more space from my boot partition. yesterday i uninstalled several programs to free some space. disk cleanup only found ~500 mb to clean. c: had 123 gb free diskspace after that. today, after a reboot, only 120 gb free space left on c: – where did these 3 gb go? according to treesize free windows folder takes 55,9 gb diskspace in total. there is winsxs folder, 18,7 (!) gb huge. installer folder takes 9,9 gb. system32 takes 9,7 gb and temp is eating 5,1 gb although i already cleaned up %temp%. on c: (root) system volume information eats 11,9 gb, msocache takes 750 mb. running disk cleanup again shows 0 kb to cleanup, even if i click on button for cleaning up system files. so what can i do instead of disk cleanup? why does winsxs have to be ~20 gb huge? and why is there still 5 gb in temp folder after deleting everything in %temp%? and do i really need msocache? i’m not going to uninstall office 2010. every diskspace eater else belongs programdata, progam files (installed application) and users.

Hello anomyous,

Did you also check for how much space is being consumed by files within the following folder? Look in:

C:\Windows\Logs\CBS

If you see tons of log and CAB files and if you see that some of these log and CAB files are more than a few KB in size and perhaps up to 2GB in size, then this is one issue which Disk Cleanup can not fix. The issue is due to a bug in Windows which creates these CBS log and CAB files. The CAB files contain nothing more than compressed versions of — guess what? CBS log files!

The solution for the above? Simply delete all of the log and CAB files in the C:\Windows\Logs\CBS folder and then reboot your computer. It has been several months since I last did this on all of my Win7 computers. I can’t recall if, upon trying to delete (blow out) all of the log and CAB files within the C:\Windows\Logs\CBS folder caused a popup window to appear which stated that I needed Administrator privileges to continue. If so, I simply clicked the Yes button.

After rebooting and after a short bit of time, Windows 7 will merrily create new CBS log and CAG files which are based on all of the presently installed updates on your Windows 7 computer. After rebooting and waiting 10 minutes for Windows 7 to become completely stable, look again in the C:\Windows\Logs\CBS folder. You should see just a few files consisting of a new CBS.log file and perhaps one or a few new CAB files which start with “CbsPersist” in the file names for those new CAB files. All new log and CAB files should be only tens of KB in size, or less.

The upshot is that both the CBS log files and the CAB files which contain nothing more than archived CBS log files are just that — log files. You can not harm your computer by deleting all of the log and CAB files within the C:\Windows\Logs\CBS folder since, again, these are nothing more than log files. Deleting them will not harm your computer.

Best regards,

–GTP

P.S.: A note to all Win7 users: After reinstalling Windows 7 and installing all updates, all Win7 users will want to perform the above procedure after they have gotten their new Win7 installation fully updated, and/or after having used Disk Cleanup to remove all superseded updates. Otherwise, and in particular when the size of the CAB files reaches around 2GB in size, a cascade will occur in which new CAB files will be created which are also around 2GB in size. This causes a noticeable impact on OS speed while new huge log and CAB files are being created. All of this is due to the fact that Microsoft’s programmers never dreamed that Win7 would eventually receive hundreds of Windows Updates over the years.

3 users thanked author for this post.

Cascadian, MrBrian, Kirsty

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cbs folder is not that big, only ~1 gb. and i always keep only one system restore point due to constantly missing harddisk space and system restore is set to another partition (d:).

the biggest folders are: winsxs folder, 18,7 (!) gb huge. installer folder takes 9,9 gb. system32 takes 9,7 gb

c:\windows\temp was eating 5,1 gb before, now only 300 mb after i deleted all files beginning with cab_ from c:\windows\temp.

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The CBS folders on my Win7 computers, after performing what I described in my previous post, are all less than 100 MB in size. Given that your CBS folder is less than 1GB in size, you are not running into the >2GB issue which plagues zipped CBS log files. If you follow my instructions in my previous folder regarding the CBS folder, you will free up over 900 MB of disk space.

My winsxs folders on my Win7 computers are all around 15.5 GB in size. The somewhat smaller size in comparison to your reported size is most likely due to the fact that I have not downloaded and installed some updates, and perhaps due to the fact that I am on Group B such that the Monthly Security Only update packages are smaller than the Monthly Security and Quality Rollup packages.

Just curious — what is the nature of your computer and its hard drive(s)?

 

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also group b, security only on my windows 7 64bit. maybe office makes winsxs folder bigger? have office 2010 installed, up to date regarding january patches. no february patches installed yet, as woody still is on defcon 2…

my computer is a compac workstation z400. intel xeon w3540 cpu 2,93 ghz, 6 gb ram, nvidia gtx 660 ti
have installed two harddrives installed, ~1 tb each. first drive is divided into 900 gb c: and ~100 gb for hp restore partition f:, second drive has also two partitions: 600 gb d: (where windows system restore is located) and ~300 gb e:

i did not yet dare doing anything to cbs folder. so no, i did not yet follow your instructions regarding this folder.

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