• Patch Lady – cleaning up on the weekend

    Posted on June 23, 2018 at 15:56 CDT by • Comment in the Forums

    So as I’m here cleaning my house…. okay so I’m checking email and getting my email fix in BEFORE I clean my house on a weekend…. I noticed that my laptop’s C drive is getting tight.  This Lenovo has a 100Gig hard drive and with Windows 10 that is sooooooooooooo not enough.  Try 250 gig as a minimum these days.  So anyway back to cleaning up… I run treesize free and realize that there’s 10 gigs in a folder called “Packages” and specifically in what appears to be a history folder for Edge.  Note that disk clean up doesn’t touch this folder.

    I went into Edge and nuked the history off the browser (and will consider making clearing history a default), but then I googled and found this post with a couple of things of interest:

    https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/a9f30534-8d91-4bdf-8864-3a64f4b71e04/deleting-data-from-appdatalocalpackages?forum=w8itproperf

    The files in the C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Packages folder store the user configuration settings for all of the installed Modern UI Apps.

    These apps use a completely different programming model than the traditional Desktop (Win32) apps.
    It is not recommended to delete the folder.

    If you are just trying to clear the Windows Store Cache, there is a built-in component to accomplish this.
    1. Press the WinKey+Q to display the Search and type WSRESET.
    2. In the Results, click wsreset to reset the Store Cache.
    3. The Windows Store will open and confirm that the cache has been cleared.

    So like the SXS folder this is another “don’t touch” location.

    Also spotted this:

    It should be noted at this point that if you do not use any modern apps, and / or have used PowerShell to uninstall them all – see http://www.thewindowsclub.com/erase-default-preinstalled-modern-apps-windows-8 for details, then this folder can safely be deleted, with no ill effects.  I have done this on both Windows 8.1 computers I own, and they continue to function just fine.

    While I’m on the subject of nuking items remember don’t touch the Windows store is not supported and in fact if you attempt it, you can count on reinstalling your computer:

    https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4339074/removing-uninstalling-reinstalling-microsoft-store-app-not-supported

    So now that I’ve cleaned up some space on this hard drive, I need to stop procrastinating and start cleaning my bathroom.  And when I get some time later I need to give feedback that Windows 10 needs to do a better job of self cleaning up the Modern apps.

    Windows News ,
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