So, with each patch and expansion being added onto WoW over the years, what does one do when their hard drive approaches full capacity?

Yeah I know, I fail for having a small harddrive. But still, if WoW and all its components is taking up 24 gigs of space in itself, isn't that kind of a bit much for just 1 game? Good thing I don't play anything else (can't imagine what players do if they have Aion or AoC or any other MMO on the same machine too). Is there any way to trim this down?

I did browse through all the folders to try to see if everything really was unnecessary. Luckily, I came across the Cinematic folder, and that has 2 copies of each movie in it. So was obvious to remove 1 copy of each of those. Additionally, there are PDF files of each book manual in there. 100+ pages of instructions I already have in hard copy, so I removed them as well. That was maybe 500+ megs there, but still, with each patch and each expansion, is Blizzard going to eventually have to trim down the size of the game's files and such? What's gonna happen? I kinda knew this situation would come up, but never saw a post about it before.

Is there any other temporary solution within reason I can do? In before somebody says "buy a new computer", although I could buy a slightly larger hard drive for this laptop, since I haven't had to put any $$$ into it and it's paid for itself at this point in its usage. Installation is still possibly covered under a service plan through the place I bought it.

But I guess the time/money sink that WoW is doesn't refer only to the monthly fee and chewing up lots of leisure time. It includes having to buy new machines to keep up with it.

Hi Ginevra,

We need those base game and cinematic files for patching purposes. Sometimes we may update the manual too so you don't want to get rid of those. You may delete anything in the World of Warcraft folder except these files and folders:

<Folder> Data
BackgroundDownloader.exe
Battle.net.dll
dbghelp.dll
DivxDecoder.dll
ijl15.dll
Launcher.exe
Microsoft.VC80.CRT.manifest
msvcr80.dll
Patch.html
Patch.txt
Repair.exe
Scan.dll
unicows.dll
Wow.exe
WowError.exe

That'll leave a barebones World of Warcraft installation. This will remove any addon saved variables files as well as screenshots, old patch installers and such. If you've used the online installer, you can open the World of Warcraft Installer shortcut on your desktop and delete the files inside. If you're on Windows Vista, you may delete the Blizzard Entertainment folder in C:\Users\Public\Documents\

As for the hard drive itself, you missed a sale somewhere where a 1500 TB hard drive was going on sale for $87