Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Freeing space on your computer by customizing Visual Studio

My computer has been running slowly lately which really bothers me.  I went to defrag my hard drive and didn't have 10% free space disk defragmentor recommends.

I use a utility called TreeSize which presents a navigable tree view of how much space each folder is consuming.

Previously I took for granted the fact that Visual Studio 2005 consumes 2,730 MB and Visual Studio 2008 eats up 2,562 MB.  This time I decided to look at why the are such hogs.  It turns out in my Visual Studio 2005 installation c:\program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8 there is a sub folder VC taking up 1,574MB.  This is for Visual C++ 2005 which I never plan to use.  Using Add / Remove Programs and clicking Change/Remove on Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite - ENU allowed me to easily remove Visual C++ 2005.

I'm keeping Visual C++ 2008 because I hope to play with it in the next six months or so.

During this exercise I also noticed OneNote sucking up 2,616 MB.  1,646 of it for backup files.  Our notebooks are on a network location so I don't need to be backing these up.  I turned it off by opening OneNote going to Tools, Options, Backup and unchecking "Automatically Backup".

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