Since I’m using Hyper-V in order to run my 64bit SharePoint 2007 / Windows Server 2008 development environment I have collected some useful tips and tricks over the time. Today I want to show you how you can clean your virtual hard disk from files taking up more than 3 GB of hard disk space.

Important: Since I use Hyper-V as my development environment I don’t recommend to do these things in a production environment!

Disk Cleanup

You can save up to 100 MB or 200 MB by e.g. removing temporary files.Usually you can do this by opening the properties of a local drive and then click the Disk Cleanup button. When using Windows Server 2008 you manually have to activate the features you need which makes Windows Server 2008 the better workstation for a SharePoint developer compared to Windows Vista .

In order to activate the Disk Cleanup button you need to install the Desktop Experience feature in Server Manager:

c:\windows\installer\

This folder took 2.67 GB of my hard disk space so I decided to remove the content of the folder which I don’t recommend in production environments. This folder stores files for the install and uninstall process of programs. Some files may be used in the future so removing the contents of the folder may lead to problems. For me as a developer deleting the content in my Hyper-V virtual image was ok.

I removed the contents of this folder.

Update 2009.01.22: Deleting the folders with the GUID is not a good idea because Office 2007 will not work and the Office Server links will loose their icons.

c:\msocache

If you install Office 2007 on your computer this folder is created to stores installation files. If you want to add components to your Office 2007 installation the installer takes the needed files from this folder. By deleting the contents of this I freed another 600 GB of hard disk space. If you want to add features to your Office 2007 installation you then need to insert the DVD or mount an image so the installer can access the needed installation files.

Conclusion

After deleting the files and folders you should defragment your virtual hard drive and after that you should compact the disk by using the Hyper-V Virtual Hard Disk Wizard.

I did comparable things with my Virtual PC 2007 and Virtual Server 2005 SP1 images and never experienced any problems as long as you use the virtual image as a developer image. You can do it too but you should take a closer look if this is suitable in your situation. Later on in the year 2009 there will be Solid State Disks for everyone and I think we don’t need to care about some GB of disk usage since you can copy large files with an incredible speed.

Update 2009.01.22: Please do it only if you understand and know what you are doing. ;)