Hard drive clean up

From time to time I find myself cleaning up stale files on my hardrive to conserve space. Yeah space is cheap but I am anal about keeping a clean machine.

This cleanup process is usually two step. First I will go through all my installed programs and uninstall things that I haven’t used in a long time or I no longer need. Being a developer I am constantly installing software and testing out beta products etc.. This results in a long list of random bits of software that often times is only useful for a short period of time then I will never us it again.

Once I uninstall all the unused programs I run TreeSizeFree. I am not even sure how I found this little utility but I have been using it for years with great success. It does a simple scan of your drive and will quickly show you where all your space is being taken up.

In my latest cleanup effort I noticed that a lot of space was being consumed by my TestResults directory that Visual Studio creates for each test run.

Here is a screen cap of just two TestResult directories.

So I went through and cleaned up these folders since I did not need the historical results information any longer.

I also went into Visual Studio and changed the TestRun history to save only the last 5 Test Runs instead of the default of 10 test runs. This keeps the folder bloat down and, for me, is enough history.