Sorry, forgot to mention, this is for Windows 7 only. To do this on vista you have to do it through the cmd.

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My pc uses 500mb for that and on c only... no idea what you did to have it go to 300gb

The default on mine is 1% (Windows 8.1)

Among the first things I always do after installing Windows is deactivating the system protection (aka system restore). That system always gave me more problems than solutions.

Try JDiskReport. It scans hard drive usage. Find the bigger files you no longer need and start removing them.

For me the main thing taking disk space on C: is old folders created by games. My Steam folder is on another drive though.

The moment I switched from downloading to streaming mature videos it saved me 250GB+ definitely

I just want to mention that this is NOT the default behavior of windows. By default,Windows 7 will take up to 5% of your space but never more than 10GB on larger drives(>64 GB) and up to 3% on smaller drives for restore points. It will automatically create restore points once per week and when some other events happen(e.g. installing new software),and if it doesn't have enough space,it will attempt to delete older restore points so that it doesn't go over the limit. Some programs can change this limit or forcefully create more restore points. (On older systems,system protection storage worked differently and was potentially uncapped - For example,on vista you'd need an almost 2TB drive for the system protection to take 300gb,and once you've reached around 1TB usage on your drive,the space used would start to dynamically shrink with no minimum amount.)

While that small bit of extra space certainly can be useful,don't underestimate the utility system restore provides - in particular,restoring files using system restore's shallow copy is a strong argument for keeping it active even if you consider yourself a casual user with a healthy computer that doesn't crash. Accidents do happen,and when they do,it's very helpful - especially if you don't have a backup drive or have it consistently around your computer. Say you've deleted a file and now need it back - if you've since cleared your recycle bin,then without system restore your best shot would probably be to try recovery software,and the more you've used your computer before starting the recovery,the less the chance to find the file and then there's file corruption - after enough usage,even after finding a file,it may become too corrupted to be of any use. If you have a small drive and am actively using your computer,you're in a lot of trouble. With system restore having enough space,you could (potentially) use your computer for even a month before restoring a perfect,0% corruption version of your file. Say you were writing a big assignment and managed to delete the contents of a text document - no recovery software will help you now since the file technically exists and was never deleted. System restore might help. Heck,against some primitive viruses,system restore can do a better job than an antivirus can.

If you're still thinking "my computer has been stable for the last 2 years and I backup all my files every other week",I'll give you an actual scenario that happened to me not too long ago - my browser detected there's a new version of itself available and installed it. Everything's all nice and dandy,but I didn't happen to like the changes made and decided to reinstall the previous version I have (which,by the way,might carry a security risk,but this isn't what we're currently talking about.) Upon launching the older version's installer,I was prompted with a message telling me there's another version of my browser already installed and that it needs to be installed before this version can install itself. After doing that,the older version was up looking all nice and dandy,except one thing - downgrading versions has the capability of keeping extensions,but some of the extension's data was wiped when I uninstalled the newer version. Now,I doubt many people backup their browser's extensions' data(some extensions don't even have an option to export data..),and I didn't even know the names of the files I'm looking for,or where exactly they are. System restoring the whole extensions folder worked wonders.

If you take nothing from this but one thing,then make it this - making an operating system is an extremely difficult task. The people behind the scenes don't include useless features just to bloat your system. Unless you know exactly what the consequences of what you're doing are,don't touch (or for that matter,let any software touch) internal system settings.

There is a much better way to save a lot of disk space, just delete you steam folder.
That would save about 2,5tb for me at least.

Another thing you could do is compress your text files (.iso, .exe also can be compressed to a certain extend).

Works on Windows 8 & 8.1 too.

to get space, get a NAS, i've got one 2x3TB + 5TB in my comp (4 HD)

system restore has never worked for me it always fails when needed so i also disable it,besides chances are if you need to do a restore a clean install of windows is likely in order anyways.

another thing many people dont do is turn down there virtual memory size if they have a lot of ram installed,
windows will reserve one and a half times the amount of RAM that is installed in your computer i have 32GB installed in mine so my system was reserving 48GB on my ssd,but with 32gb i just disable the virtual memory as its not needed but you can set it to like 2-4gb and be fine even if you only have 8-16gb of ram in your system:)

well, back up on a 2 tb + a 1 tb hard drive can go way over 250 + ...

Just disable hybernation and pagefile.sys and you will save a lot

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Delete some porns. Ez HDD space save.

You can leave the settings at a level that works best for you.
In addition, you can also to Computer, right click on C: drive and Properties, do a Disk Cleanup, then choose Cleanup System Files, and it gives you an extra tab to clear all the older restore points, while keeping only the latest one, in case anything does go wrong.

Mine was set at 0% on default ... so ... no savings for me :D

Uh, you probably don't want to zero it out, because then you have no system restore points. But, you know, that works too, as long as you have a windows disk and backup and are willing to reinstall if necessary.

thanks for the info. from 5% to 1% and gained about 10 gb

Mine was set to the absolute minimum of 320mb and is only using 266.66mb. Guess I definately do need a new hard drive then as I still have heaps of new uninstalled games and only ~300mb left of my 2tb hard drive :/

Thanks for the info! This explains why my HDD was getting fuller and fuller without downloading anything (I have a second partition for my downloads)

60gb from 25% to 5%.
Thanks mate.