I run Disk Cleanup probably about once every other month... it's a mood thing, that is, if I'm in the mood i methodically open every piece of software i regularly use and manually check for updates... some of the software i use such as Libre Office that nearly always requires a manual update anyway i use so infrequently i prefer to have automatic updates and/or alerts about updates turned off to stop them nagging me.

That said, this surprised me and I'm struggling to understand where this mystery 7GB came from and why it should suddenly appear now... Disk Cleanup today reported "System archived Windows Error Report" had 7.31GB (Yes that is a G) of data that could be cleaned!!

That might not be surprising for some if it wasn't for the fact that i had already disabled 'Error Reporting' some time ago and indeed when i checked my settings it confirmed Error Reporting was indeed disabled... add that I've never seen nor would i even think it possible to report such an amount of data to Microsoft I'm gobsmacked with what i saw.

I went ahead and cleaned my PC, i regret not taking a screenshot now, after rebooting (which apparently wasn't required if i believed Windows) i was finally back into Windows after waiting 5 minutes at the splash screen for Windows to 'Update'???... and then "Cleanup"... the latter made sense, the former, none at all but if memory serves me right that's what Win7 says after a Disk Cleanup... the delay i assume was the 7GB it had to delete?

Fyi, in case anyone thinks I'm confusing what i saw with a "Dump" file option i can assure you i wasn't... for the first time in a very long time (years possibly?) my PC crashed to a BSOD about 3 weeks ago when playing a video... it reminded me i hadn't changed the option to only allow mini-dumps so that 'dump' was also listed, it was circa 800MB.

In another thread i posted that my C:Windows folder was using 32GB of drive space, pretty much matching the size of my system memory, others also appeared to report the same correlation between their C:Windows folder and installed RAM... that may have just been coincidence but my C:Windows folder has suddenly shrunk to 24.3GB.. i would be interested to see if anyone else can replicate this... or explain why Disk Cleanup should suddenly find this mystery 7GB?

Nope, can't say that I see that kind of usage. The only time I've ever has a cleanup report that much is when I also clean system files and have a 'windows.old' folder on the drive of have done a clean install/updates and the downloaded update files are included.

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