Saving Space on an SSD!

If you bought an SSD for your OS a few years ago at least, then likely space is a precious commodity!  I built my last rig in 2013, SSD's were about $1/Gig back then so I got a great Samsung 840 Pro 256GB.  Love this SSD but with 256GB after 3-4 years you start to run out of space, I only have 1 giant game installed GTA V, takes nearly 80GB!!  A few smaller games and then some appz. I've been fighting with 10-20GB left for awhile now...I knew there must be some software out there that can help me but I wasn't even sure how to Google it.

Long story short and to save anyone else in this situation the trouble, I found this excellent free program called WinDirStat.

Using this program I found out NVIDIA, GARMIN and RAZER etc. don't clean up after themselves after each update so you could have 10 gigs in their download folder!  I found other install files that take up 40 gigs or so but these require a bit of extra work to figure out what can be deleted etc.  So I skipped that for now.

The big payoff came when I looked under the heading <Files>, it was taking about 40 gigs...with Hiberfil.sys accounting for 26 of that!  I figured that was to do with putting a system into Hibernation which I don't do, some quick research showed how to get rid of it safely.  Finally, the Pagefile.sys was also 10 gigs, I had set that thinking I have plenty of room (when I setup my system in 2013) but upon further reflection since I have 32GB of RAM, I don't even really need a Pagefile at all since I think the most use I ever saw was 15-16GB (I did leave a minimal one)!

So mission accomplished, I now nearly have 60GB of free space, won't be going into the red zone anytime soon!

UPDATE:  I now went back to that step of safely removing the Installer Files, can't remove them all as some are in use...this great little program can do the checks for you!  I now removed an extra 34gigs in orphaned installer files!!

https://www.ghacks.net/2015/12/13/patchcleaner-remove-orphan-windows-installer-files-to-free-up-disk-space/