How Can I Reduce The Space Windows 7 Takes Up On My Hard Drive

Now I learned about Linux and dual booting with Windows 7. I went about implementing it. I formatted my hard drive and kept a 16 GB partition for my Windows 7 as advised by Microsoft.

I installed Windows 7 Professional. After installation on first boot I saw that it had take up some 4 GB space. I installed a few apps and now I have only 1 GB of space left. I get low disk space errors and my Windows 7 freezes. On examining I found that 3 folders on my Windows partition were the space hogs. 1) System 32 2) AppData 3) Winsxs. Winsxs is a whooping 8 GB + folder.

How do I optimize these three folders to have a better experience? Please guide as I don’t want to mess up by deleting files in these folders as I don’t know their implications