|
There are isolated problems with current patches, but they are well-known and documented on this site. |
First off I hope everyone in the United States had a wonderful and safe Thanksgiving. I cooked and cleaned up the kitchen and now I’m working on clea
[See the full post at: Patch Lady – cleaning up the installer folder]
Susan Bradley Patch Lady/Prudent patcher
interesting tool, well worth a test 
MS Office can be a pain leaving several older versions of monthly updates for Word/Excel/… in the Installer folder, each several 10s or even +100MB in size.
I typically cleaned up the folder manually. I add the Title column in Windows Explorer and for some of the msi/msp files you can then easily see what they are for and which version they are.
The older versions can safely be deleted.
The script here https://forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/presenting%E2%80%A6-startcomponentcleanup-for-msi-including-office.77708/ is the absolute best.
You may need a sign-in to read the full thread.
I remember i put it on pastebin few months ago
https://pastebin.com/DWvsRu3p
I saved this script in my root directory as “msi_startcomponentcleanup.vbs” then ran it in administrator cmd window. No results showed, so I saved it again after uncommenting the one line (as noted in the MDL discussion). Ran it again and it displayed all status 1 msi installers! I’m sure the first run didn’t show any cleaning because I had recently upgraded to 1903 and had no superceeded msi files to clean. Great tool!
Win10 Pro x64 22H2, Win10 Home 22H2, Linux Mint + a cat with 'tortitude'.
There are 2 different mechanisms.
One is for updating Windows which is based on Component Based Servicing (CBS) which is the one which you mentioned.
The other one is for updating Office which is based on Windows Installer/.msi files.
Disk Cleanup or the command line dism only address the Windows Update cleanup.
I have a 1TB Crucial SSD and it is close to being full. Certainly some files can be moved to an external drive, but is it convenient?
When and if 2TB drives will get much cheaper, then I might consider upgrading the current drive.
Until then, even those few GB which can be freed are useful, if not for hosting other files, at least for being used as SSD overprovisioning / empty non-partitioned space at the end of the drive for random write performance and for potentially increasing the lifetime of the drive.
Otherwise, there is no urgent need to use any of the cleaners, either the tool presented by Susan which is good enough in most situations or the script to which I made reference earlier which is superior in the sense that it is technically better, but even more important, transparent to be analysed and validated by those concerned about its actions and who have at least basic technical understanding of the VBScript language.
The builtin Windows Disk Cleanup utility run as either admin or regular user will reduce the number/size of old update files. The space cleanup section in All settings –> System–>Storage may do this as well although nothing listed here when I checked. May be because I recently installed V1809 and there hasn’t been enough updates yet to leave much clutter lying around.
The disk cleanup app accessed from the start menu does however, show about 300 Mb of update stuff that could be deleted or compressed if I told the app to do so.
Fair point
although, Windows Installer itself has not been updated since Windows 7
not the mechanism and structure anyway, but surely got (and keep getting) imporovements and fixes
I’m sorry to say this, but in my experience nothing beats (at least in Win 7) running the native Disk Cleaner (which always does a sloppy job), then manually running a search for “*.tmp” on the drive. After eliminating those, I go to the “Windows/Temp” directory and blow away anything over a week old.
Seems to work. YMMV.
“Now if only Windows could do this itself…”
To a rather inefficient degree, win 7 has the built-in Disk Cleaning utility…do you mean Win 10 doesn’t??
Another reason not to upgrade…
Win7 Pro SP1 64-bit, Dell Latitude E6330 ("The Tank"), Intel CORE i5 "Ivy Bridge", 12GB RAM, Group "0Patch", Multiple Air-Gapped backup drives in different locations. Linux Mint Newbie
--
"The more kinks you put in the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the pipes." -Scotty
Windows 10 certainly has this capability built in, and it’s better than what’s included with Windows 7.
It’s adopted a couple of things that you could previously only get in tools like CCleaner, like the ability to delete files in TEMP or the Recycle Bin after a certain number of days, and/or automatically if you start running low on disk space.
Basically, it’ll do automatically what you’re currently doing manually.
EDITED for content
As others have mentioned. Right click on the drive you want to ‘clean,’ select ‘Properties’ then ‘Disk Clean-up.’ When the additional window opens select ‘Clean-up system files,’ and once the scan is complete select the types of files for deletion. This can clean out old Windows installations and update files.
None of the built-in Windows Cleanup tools touch Windows\Installer files/folders.
I downloaded and installed Patch Cleaner and ran it. I moved almost 5GB from Windows\Installer to a different folder on a different drive, where I will leave them for a couple of weeks. If nothing untoward happens, I’ll empty that folder.
So far, so good.
The windows.old is part of the Windows upgrade where it stores the old version for 10 days so you can roll back.
I’ve been using this software for 2 years with no problems so far. Office 2013 and 2016 are not damaged. In fact, Windows should discard old office .MSI files when superseeded by new updates, but it does not.
If you run DiskCleanup as Administrator, it will clean it up for you. You only have 10 days after an upgrade to roll back.
I think Windows will delete the file after 10 days.
Donations from Plus members keep this site going. You can identify the people who support AskWoody by the Plus badge on their avatars.
AskWoody Plus members not only get access to all of the contents of this site -- including Susan Bradley's frequently updated Patch Watch listing -- they also receive weekly AskWoody Plus Newsletters (formerly Windows Secrets Newsletter) and AskWoody Plus Alerts, emails when there are important breaking developments.
Notifications
