After recently realising that Media Center eats about 5gb for each tuner it thinks it has, and DVBlink v4 supplying 8 virtual tuners to each machine, I realised that I needed to find out where all my hard disk space had disappeared to. Granted I didn’t start out with that much, given my Mac Mini only has a 128gb SSD installed, this mean doing something I didn’t think I would need to in this day and age… hacking Windows settings to send it on a diet.

The first test is to find out where it’s all going, I used the free utility WinDirStat, which is useful for visualising the used space. This showed a couple of things, most of the files used are in the system and user folders, but the largest thing was basically invisible, in the form of offline folder caching which I had inadvertently switch on when routing my pictures and my video folders directly to the home server.

The offline cache had topped out at 20gb of video I didn’t need stored so I went to disable it. Unfortunately this didn’t delete the files in question, only stopped it for using the service. To delete the cache I had to use this guide to edit the registry (something not recommended for newbies as it is dangerous to the health of your computer if you get things wrong).

That saved 20gb which is a good step, next is the winsxs folder in the system folder, which holds some system files and some backup files from various installations. Luckily for Windows 7 there’s a command line that can tidy up the folder and save some space, but you should start with the standard disk clean up tool first. This saved 2gb. I then discovered that system restore points eat space, as its a media center only I don’t need to safety net, so disabled those from the ‘system’ control panel, that give you 4gb.

Finally I decided that as I have a SSD based machine, with 4gb of memory and it only runs Media Center, I can do without the system page’s feature, which matches your memory’s size with some virtual memory on the hard disk. As media center should never need that function I’m going to try disabling it and see how things work out.

I can also recommend looking at the ‘Windows Features’ panel and switching off some of the redundant services (games, gadgets and tablet pc features to name a few), I’m not sure if that saves space because I did that before really tracking what was used.

So now I’m in better shape to use DVBlink and 8 tuners, the system should be using around 20gb, live tv buffering will take another 40gb for 8 tuners which will leave 45gb for local recordings before bing pushed up to the Windows Home Server using the Tv Archive addon. The next time I come to install I’m going to try doing a clean install of Windows 7 without OSX and bootcamp and that’s the largest remaining space hog, with its 15gb partition.

It’s worth pointing out that this is only ever worth doing it if (A) you know what you’re doing, or (B) don’t really care if things go wrong. Always backup any data (or better yet just don’t keep any on there, that’s what the Home Server’s for after all) and only do something like this if you really really need the space, as Windows 7 runs wonderfully if left to it’s own devices.

(image credit, the always adorable Maru)