Free Up Disk Space on Dell Mini 9 and Netbooks

This is a quick tutorial mainly for netbooks on how to Free up space in Windows XP.

I recently acquired a Dell Mini 9 Netbook from the Dell outlet for $251, shipped after taxes. I could not pass up the deal. I got the white (alpine) model with 1 gb ram, 1.3mp webcam, 8 gig ssd running windows xp service pack 3. The problem is, when I got the computer, it already had 7.5 gigs of the 8 gig drive used up! There was not even enough room to install MS Office on it. So, I took the following steps to get my Dell mini 9 more hard drive storage.

1.) Backup your computer - Use something like "Norton Ghost" or your own preferred software. --This is not required, but should be done if you are scared to lose any of your data.

2.) Go to Control Panel --Add Remove Programs: Remove everything you don't need, below is what I removed:

• Browser Address Error Redirector (if it is installed)
• Dell Support Center
• GoToAssist
• MS Works
• Google Toolbar (if installed)
• Google Desktop (if installed)
• McAfee trial (if it is installed and you have your own AV)

3.) Clear your recycle bin, reboot

4.) Go into explorer and copy the Dell, Drivers, and I386 folders to somewhere else. (They all reside in C:) In my case, I just moved them into the SDHC card that I had purchased. However, moving them to a thumbdrive, cd, dvd, or network drive works just as well. They are really just for backup copies. Once you have "backed up" those folder, Delete Them. They are not necessary.

5.) Turn off Hybernation support (The mini boots super fast, so you should never need to hybernate or suspend the pc) Disabling this will free up as much disk space as you have ram. IE, I have 2 gig of ram, so removing this gave me 2gb of disk space.

• Open the Windows Control Panel
  
• Double-click Power Options (you may need to click "Classic mode" on the upper left first)
• Click the Hibernate tab, de-select the 'Enable hibernate support' check box, and then click Apply.
• Restart your computer and hiberfil.sys will be automatically deleted. (my computer did not require a restart)

6.) Install whatever software you would like. I installed Office 2003 Professional, VLC Media, Firefox, CutePDF, and Flash support and currently have 3.5GB of Free Disk Space.

I will add more to this tutorial at another time. For example, there are a few free programs you can run that allow you to clean up old windows update files.