I've not used Windows on a home computer for several years but decided to create a virtual machine of Windows 10 just to see how it is. So installed a clean copy downloaded from Microsoft website and added SharePoint Designer 2013 and Visual Studio Community 2015 to give a first go.
After installing these the virtual machine file was 58gb!! I ran a few clean up programs and compacted the OS which brought it down to 55gb but this is still a crazy size just for an OS and two applications.
How do I get this back down to a much more manageable level? At this level I will have to remove the OS as its eating up too much of my SSD as a secondary OS
Windows 10 x64 (if you compact the OS, disable hibernation and so on) is about 6GB. You can get it down to under 4GB if you delete all the store apps and compress "C:Program Files" and so on. If you have VMs and run dedup you can make them smaller still. x86 is smaller but I don't use it.
Visual Studio is massive - I wanted to install it on my laptop but simply don't have the space. Not sure about the space requirements of SharePoint as I've not tried.
What is your question? How to reduce the size of a VM (in which case say what you are using - VMWare or Hyper-V or whatever)
Or are you saying that these 2 programs are large? If that is the case then you either need to allocate space for them or not install them (or at least not all components). Certainly with Visual Studio you can chose what components you need and it tells you how much dasd it will take.
Windows 10 isn't your problem here though - 10 is far smaller than 7 or 8. Your problem is installing huge programs.
What I do though after installing software on a VM or upgrading it is to shrink it again. This is because I'm short on disk space on my laptop. It shouldn't be a daily process but this works better for me on Hyper-V and VMware.
Inside the guest (after tidying up) run defrag to consolidate free space (defrag /h /x), run defrag to do slab consolidation(defrag /h /o), run sdelete and then compact (or just copy to another virtual disk).
Thanks for the quick reply.
My initial question I guess is how to identify the cause of the 55gb size? The only large application according to "Settings" is Visual Studio at circa 8gb (the install programme advised the total install would be 8.8gb) There are no downloads or photos/music etc. I dont know how big SharePoint Designer is but I certainly dont think its anywhere close to the 30gig or so thats being used up
Second question will be how to slim things down.
Hi try installing e.g. Windirstat (free) - cushion image -> quick identification of large files and regions (folders + subfolders). Also shows simple tree.
As lx07 says, if you have hibernation/hybrid sleep enabled that's one large file - hyberfil.sys. Pagefile.sys will be another.
Clearly C: increases with application related temporary and working files and folders, backups of installed updates, and user files and folders in the usual locations. You can opt to install most programs on another disk/partition, as you'll know.
I have programs installed on D, and almost no personal data on C: - with hyberfil.sys, but pagefile.sys moved to another drive, that's 45Gb.
There's on large vdi file - 2.9Gb, and 2-3Gb of temporary data, so say 39Gb.
How much space is the C drive taking up from within Windows? The virtual machine file size could be very large due to a hibernation file, provisioning, etc.
