Cleaning %windir%\Installer

SSD’s are becoming very common. They’re not big as big as spindle drives yet (not cost effectively atleast). This makes watching the hard drive usage more important.

Back to the days of analyzing disk usage and removing the unwanted files.

There’s a few tools I use

• ccleaner – very good tool, I run it pretty regularly
• windirstat – tool to analyze disk usage

If you take a look, you’ll see that the c:\windows\installer folder is exceptionally large. A quick web search shows mixed results, with two contradicting results (both from Microsoft – one from MSDN, and the other from TechNet).

The TechNet article claims that you can not delete the files in that folder “flatly: No” with no convincing explanation. I didn’t buy it.

The MSDN article is a little better, it even has a script that you can use to determine which files can be deleted.

I wrote a small tool that moves the unwanted files over to a backup folder.

My suggestion would be to run the tool and keep the “backup_#” folder it creates around for a while (just in case you run into some problems later), or maybe move it off your SSD and onto a storage media.

You can download the tool here.

Usage: CleanUnusedInstallers.exe !
(running it without the ‘!’ will cause it to run in TraceOnly mode, and it will not make any changes to your files)