Remember this old song about Windows 95 ? Softwares on Windows have always been demanding on hard disks, and it seems that disk capacity will never be enough. As mine is quite fixed, I am doing my best to optimize disk usage.
First thing I do is to regularly clean my temporary folders. Here are sample command-lines for this :
Second thing is to use the Cleanup Tool. Either use it manually (launch %SystemRoot%\system32\cleanmgr.exe and follow the instructions) or automate it.
But all this is not enough, and I recently checked my drive for wasted space. And I happened to find that my %SystemRoot%\Installer folder was taking up more than 2.6Gb ! I tried to google this folder to find more about it, but I found that documentation is rather scarce. I could only find that what lies in there is very application dependent, and more research showed me that in fact a single application was responsible for about a 2.2Gb bloat : Visual Studio 2005. Or, to be more precise, VS2005 Service Pack 1 alone was responsible for this. So for those interested, here are two links about this matter and possible fixes by Heath Stewart : about VS2005 SP1 and about the patch cache.
IMHO, there must be something wrong in design about this cache feature...
Labels: Visual Studio, Windows
