3 Ways to Free Up Unnecessarily Used HDD Space on Windows 7

1. Hibernation Reserved Space

Hibernation reserves drive space up to the amount of memory your system has. To disable hibernation and recover that drive space, type the following command with administrator privileges in cmd.exe.

powercfg -h off

2. Decrease Virtual Memory

Similar to hibernation, the system page file, or virtual memory, reserves drive space up to the amount of memory your system has. This should never be disabled, but you can reduce it to a more reasonable size, especially if you have over 4 GB of memory. Follow the steps below.

• Right-click “Computer” and click “Properties”

• Click on “Advanced system settings” in the left column

• In the “Performance” section, click on “Settings”

• Go to the “Advanced” tab

• In the “Virtual Memory” section, click on “Change”

• Uncheck “Automatically manage paging file size for all drives”

• Choose the “Custom size” radio button

• Set the “Initial size (MB):” to 512

• Set the “Maximum size (MB):” to 1024

• Restart your computer for changes to take effect

3. Remove Service Pack 1 Backups

Thanks to Alan McBurney for this tip.

After installing Service Pack 1, about 4 GB is used to maintain backup files. If you are certain that you will never need to revert to a pre-SP1 state, you can free up this space by typing the following command with administrator privileges in cmd.exe.

DISM /online /Cleanup-Image /SpSuperseded