With all the things we use our computers for, we never seem to have enough hard drive space. There are several tools to make sure you are optimizing what is stored on your computer, including VMware tools, covered in other Knowledge Central posts.
Windows has a built-in tool called Disk Cleanup. This can be launched by clicking the start button and typing in Disk Cleanup. This is what the tool looks like:
From here, you can delete temporary files, and other installation files. One part that helps a lot with clean up is selecting 'Clean up system files'. After clicking this, Disk Cleanup will scan additional system files that can be deleted. As you can see, my original example went from 96 MB to 4.57 GB!
A big culprit of this is the Windows Update Cleanup. After an update is complete, and you know everything is running well, it is safe to clean those files out. When you have selected the files to delete, press the OK button, and Disk Cleanup will remove the selected files. You may be prompted to restart your computer.
This is a good thing to not only run on your notebook, but also on any virtual images that you have on your computer.
-Steve Schneebeli
Director of Engineering / IT