Clearing out space on your parent’s system hard drive
I was at my parent’s place and discovered that their home PC’s system partition was nearly full. Naturally the easiest way to free up some storage is to simply delete files that aren’t necessary on the hard drive - particularly in the c:\windows directory.
Here’s some quick ways to clear out some unneeded files and free up some space on your system partition.
* SERVICE PACK UNINSTALL (c:\Windows\$NTServicePackUinistall$)
This is safe to delete, assuming you never plan on uninstalling the currently installed service pack.
* SERVICE PACK UPDATE/HOTFIX UNINSTALL BACKUPS (c:\windows\$NTUninstall********)
These directories are safe to delete, assuming you never plan on doing an uninstall of any of these updates.
* DOWNLOADED INSTALLATIONS
(C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download)
(C:\WINDOWS\Downloaded Installations)
These directories are safe to delete.
* SERVICESPACKFILES (C:\Windows\ServicePackFiles)
DO NOT DELETE - This directory is where the operating system gets its backups from if in the event it needs to recover from some sort of file corruption that’s detected using Windows File Protection.
* HOTFIX MIGRATION (c:\Windows\$hf_mig$)
DO NOT DELETE - This directory stores copies of the most recent versions of hotfixed system files so that older versions included in subsequently applied patches do not get applied to the operating system accidentally. (See http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;824994)
Tags:Computer, Hard drive, parent system, partition, pc, Windows
