I sat with my kids while they watched Justin Time (they love it) on New Years day and I started to clear up the disk in my Dell XPS 13. Its a 256GB SSD and while its not tiny it does need a certain about of housekeeping to keep on top of it.

After Dropbox and its bulging photo collection and the Windows 8.1 installation, the biggest bloat was coming from Visual Studio and Office. I also have a couple of Linux Virtual machines and a SharePoint VHD which I boot into to do SharePoint 2013 development.

I had already decided to learn some new languages this year, specifically Clojure and Ruby and also to work on my Python skills. So with this in mind and the frustration of a bloated disk I resolved to make some sweeping changes. Clojure and Ruby setup on Windows is doable, but by all accounts its not comfortable and not my fun so I decided to make the Linux install more permanent on my laptop.

I have a Shuttle box sitting under my desk which I use with ESXi for virtual machine. I’m not really running any VMs at the moment on there so for now, I’ve stuck an SSD in there with SharePoint 2013 and Visual Studio 2013 on to do my SharePoint work - thats the SharePoint VM sorted out.