So I had my Asus Eee PC migrated to Windows XP by a friend the other night so I can include some of my favorite Win tools in it.
Since the Eee PC only had 4GB of SSD space in it, I was careful in adding too many unnecessary and bloated applications. Total disk usage was around 1.3GB after fresh installation so the remaining 2.7+ or so gigabytes of space is still enough.
However, after a reboot, I found out I only had 800MB space left. I don’t know where the other 1.9GB went. I manually audited each folder and saw that actual usage is 1.3GB but disk property says otherwise (3.1+GB).
That’s when I was advised to download and install WinDirStat (short for Windows Directory Statistics, a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Microsoft Windows).
The free software immediately showed the actual usage on the disk by folders. That’s when the hidden pagefile.sys appeared and reported eating up 1.9+GB of space. This file is like a scratch disk or a swap file used by the system for RAM management and it was set too high.
Since I have 1GB of RAM, I decided to disable the ram disk altogether to free up all the space. I’ve also installed it on my desktop to check which folders are bloated and need cleaning up. A very nice tool to have if you’re limited on space or conscious about racking too much media files on your hard drives.
My friend works at a Call Center and installed a licensed Win XP OS he has on spare.