Please help put my my C Drive on a diet!

[Musical]

Hi all,
Ive been cleaning up my computer and trying to make enough room for the OS to "breath" and get ready to install SP3. The partition is only 10Gigs and up until recently, Ive always been able to keep it with 25% free which I consider is the minimum I like. Seeing it was only about 20% ALL DAY Ive been trying to get strategic such as deleting a couple of user profiles that were never used but still keeping a spare admin one of course...retrieved over 200MBs! doing some uninstalling of unused programmes... clearing out the flotsam and such like. I managed to get it to 2.6Gigs free but now after SP3 Im down to 18% free. Sooo this calls for more action.

Somewhere in the dim past I remember something about these files being just excess baggage and are safe to delete after verifying through a bit of time that the update was OK, ... In C> WINDOWS > is a whole lot of uninstallers (eg $NtUninstallKB810217$) dating back to 2003. So Are these safe to remove? If not are they OK to copy to another partition? They mount up to over 500MBs!

Advice greatly appreciated thanks, as well as more suggestions!

Cheers Musical : )

[chewdz]

Somewhere in the dim past I remember something about these files being just excess baggage and are safe to delete after verifying through a bit of time that the update was OK, ... In C> WINDOWS > is a whole lot of uninstallers (eg $NtUninstallKB810217$) dating back to 2003. So Are these safe to remove? If not are they OK to copy to another partition? They mount up to over 500MBs!

They cannot be removed as they contain the info that helps Windows to uninstall the hotfix in an event that the hotfix goes haywire. I'm not sure if they can be copied completely to another partition. Maybe other members can give you the answer. Plus, you can try Disk Cleanup and delete those old compressed files. Do take note though, that may take quite some time.

(P/S:Do correct me if i'm wrong. Thanks.)

Cheers, chewdz

[drragostea]

I would suggest you leave the Windows patches and components as it is. If I were in your shoes, I might as well monitor the things that enter my machine and the things that are installed and uninstalled (referring to your 10GB HD).

System Restore files can take up a lot of space if they accumulate. But it can also be risky if you remove them all. That's one of my guesses.

[Musical]

OK thanks for your comments guys. System restore is something I value and indeed it has saved my butt more than once.

Now, when you say "remove them all" does that mean I can go in and delete some of them? If so that might be a goer.

Also I have just formatted as NTFS a Free 35 GIG partition that has been sitting unused for ever since I had my computer and was intended for something else which now wont be. What Ive been thinking is installing a 2nd instance of XP Pro on this partition. Is this possible? (Just to give a general guideline as to sizes, I have 3 partitions on a 80GIG Drive. C 10GIG, D 30GIG and F 35GIG) It would be a doddle to "clear" the files off the D drive as Ive just recently backed them up to external media.

Ive been researching about the viablility of removing these uninstallers and there seems to be conflicting reports about it and so far, the threads are a bit old, so I guess the best thing is to go to Windows Website and get it from the horses mouth. Ive only come across M$ instructions to either delete or RELOCATE Windows 2000 uninstallers.

Musical