Make space on C:

  • Thread starter Thread starter Brad
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B

Brad

Thanks for taking the time to ready my question.

I am looking to delete any unneeded files from my C: drive to make some
space. I did a search for all files on C: that are larger than 1MB and the
search came up with a bunch of files in C:\WINDOWS\Installer with the file
extension of .msp I found this page (http://www.fileinfo.com/extension/mfp)
and File Type 1 seems to be it.

Can I delete these files? It would really make a lot of room on my C: drive.

Thanks,
Brad
 
Brad said this on 4/22/2009 2:38 PM:
Thanks for taking the time to ready my question.

I am looking to delete any unneeded files from my C: drive to make some
space. I did a search for all files on C: that are larger than 1MB and the
search came up with a bunch of files in C:\WINDOWS\Installer with the file
extension of .msp I found this page (http://www.fileinfo.com/extension/mfp)
and File Type 1 seems to be it.

Can I delete these files? It would really make a lot of room on my C: drive.

Thanks,
Brad

First off you got the wrong extension. Its MSP not MFP. Big difference.

Second, I'd ask how big is the drive? There are pretty good utilities
now that will migrate an XP installation from a small C: drive to a
larger C: drive. And you don't lose a thing. As cheap as drives are
now, I'd almost tell you to do that first.

Last, have you tried CCleaner.exe. Its does a pretty good job of
cleaning and making space. Still cleanup is a stopgap at best. #2 is
a better idea.
 
Shoot, I thought I fixed that (MFP - MSP). Thanks for catching it.

I do use CCcleaner. I have a small laptop I got for free. It's not really
worth putting a new HD in it. I guess I'll just have to start looking for a
new laptop.

Thanks agian,

Brad
 
Brad said this on 4/22/2009 3:15 PM:
Shoot, I thought I fixed that (MFP - MSP). Thanks for catching it.

I do use CCcleaner. I have a small laptop I got for free. It's not really
worth putting a new HD in it. I guess I'll just have to start looking for a
new laptop.

Thanks agian,

Brad
Google that "c:\windows\installer" string and see what it says till you
get better responses. Seems to me, it implies that its needed for
updates and uninstalls. But a lot of people have said they just copy
it to another location incase they want to restore the files. Not
just flat out delete them.
 
That's what I found too. Just wondering if anyone knew anything different. I
don't really have anywhere else to put them.

Thanks agian for your help.

Have a great day,

Brad
 
Brad

You can create more free space in C by
carrying any of the measures suggested below.

The default allocation to System Restore is 12% on your C partition
which is over generous. I would reduce it to 700 mb. Right click your My
Computer icon on the Desktop and select System Restore. Place the cursor
on your C drive select Settings but this time find the slider and drag
it to the left until it reads 700 mb and exit. When you get to the
Settings screen click on Apply and OK and exit.

A default setting which could be wasteful is that for temporary internet
files, especially if you do not store offline copies on disk. The
default allocation is 3% of drive. Depending on your attitude to offline
copies you could reduce this to 1% or 2%. In Internet Explorer select
Tools, Internet Options, General, Temporary Internet Files, Settings to
make the change. At the same time look at the number of days history is
held.

The default allocation for the Recycle Bin is 10 % of drive. Change to
5%, which should be sufficient. In Windows Explorer place the cursor
on your Recycle Bin, right click and select Properties, Global and
move the slider from 10% to 5%. However, try to avoid letting it get
too full as if it is full and you delete a file by mistake it will
bypass the Recycle Bin and be gone for ever.

If your drive is formatted as NTFS another potential gain arises with
your operating system on your C drive. In the Windows Directory of
your C partition you will have some Uninstall folders in your Windows
folder typically: $NtServicePackUninstall$ and $NtUninstallKB282010$
etc. These files may be compressed or not compressed. If compressed
the text of the folder name appears in blue characters. If not
compressed you can compress them. Right click on each folder and
select Properties, General, Advanced and check the box before Compress
contents to save Disk Space. On the General Tab you can see the amount
gained by deducting the size on disk from the size. Folder
compression is only an option on a NTFS formatted drive / partition.

Select Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, System
Information, Tools, Dr Watson and verify that the box before "Append to
existing log" is NOT checked. This means the next time the log is
written it will overwrite rather than add to the existing file.

The default maximum size setting for Event Viewer logs is too large.
Reset the maximum for each log from 512 kb to 128 kb and set it to
overwrite.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308427/en-us


Select Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk CleanUp to
Empty your Recycle Bin and Remove Temporary Internet Files. Also
select Start, All Programs, accessories, System Tools, Disk CleanUp,
More Options, System Restore and remove all but the latest System
Restore point. Run Disk Defragmenter.


--



Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
Brad said:
I am looking to delete any unneeded files from my C: drive to make
some space. I did a search for all files on C: that are larger than
1MB and the search came up with a bunch of files in
C:\WINDOWS\Installer with the file extension of .msp I found this
page (http://www.fileinfo.com/extension/mfp) and File Type 1 seems
to be it.

Can I delete these files? It would really make a lot of room on my
C: drive.

I'd not touch those.

If you want ways to free up space:

If you are comfortable with the stability of your system, you can delete the
uninstall files for the patches that Windows XP has installed...
http://www3.telus.net/dandemar/spack.htm
( Particularly of interest here - #4 )
( Alternative: http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_hotfix_backup.htm )

You can run Disk Cleanup - built into Windows XP - to erase all but your
latest restore point and cleanup even more "loose files"..

How to use Disk Cleanup
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310312

You can turn off hibernation if it is on and you don't use it..

When you hibernate your computer, Windows saves the contents of the system's
memory to the hiberfil.sys file. As a result, the size of the hiberfil.sys
file will always equal the amount of physical memory in your system. If you
don't use the hibernate feature and want to recapture the space that Windows
uses for the hiberfil.sys file, perform the following steps:

- Start the Control Panel Power Options applet (go to Start, Settings,
Control Panel, and click Power Options).
- Select the Hibernate tab, clear the "Enable hibernation" check box, then
click OK; although you might think otherwise, selecting Never under the
"System hibernates" option on the Power Schemes tab doesn't delete the
hiberfil.sys file.
- Windows will remove the "System hibernates" option from the Power Schemes
tab and delete the hiberfil.sys file.

You can control how much space your System Restore can use...

1. Click Start, right-click My Computer, and then click Properties.
2. Click the System Restore tab.
3. Highlight one of your drives (or C: if you only have one) and click on
the "Settings" button.
4. Change the percentage of disk space you wish to allow.. I suggest moving
the slider until you have just about 1GB (1024MB or close to that...)
5. Click OK.. Then Click OK again.

You can control how much space your Temporary Internet Files can utilize...

Empty your Temporary Internet Files and shrink the size it stores to a
size between 64MB and 128MB..

- Open ONE copy of Internet Explorer.
- Select TOOLS -> Internet Options.
- Under the General tab in the "Temporary Internet Files" section, do the
following:
- Click on "Delete Cookies" (click OK)
- Click on "Settings" and change the "Amount of disk space to use:" to
something between 64MB and 128MB. (It may be MUCH larger right
now.)
- Click OK.
- Click on "Delete Files" and select to "Delete all offline contents"
(the checkbox) and click OK. (If you had a LOT, this could take 2-10
minutes or more.)
- Once it is done, click OK, close Internet Explorer, re-open Internet
Explorer.

You can use an application that scans your system for log files and
temporary files and use that to get rid of those:

Ccleaner (Free!)
http://www.ccleaner.com/

Other ways to free up space..

SequoiaView
http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/

JDiskReport
http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/index.html

Those can help you visually discover where all the space is being used.

In the end - a standard Windows XP installation with all sorts of extras
will not likely be above about 4.5GB to 9GB in size. If you have more space
than that (likely do on a modern machine) and most of it seems to be used -
likely you need to copy *your stuff* off and/or find a better way to manage
it.

Also - if you don't have a drive that size - even laptop drives are
inexpensive these days.
 
Gerry,

No fault intended as I've seen some MVPs make the same
recommendation also: "The default maximum size setting
for Event Viewer logs is too large. Reset the maximum for
each log from 512 kb to 128 kb".

The most a user could hope to save would be about 1.15MB of disk
space. Not much of a savings even on a small 20GB laptop.
 
JS

I agree it's not a significant saving. It's just wasteful. It probably could
be set even lower. However, it's not a mistake.

--


Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
Shenan said:
In the end - a standard Windows XP installation with all sorts of
extras will not likely be above about 4.5GB to 9GB in size.

In another thread, a poster was talking about his Asus mini-laptop. The
drive is only 4GB! What do you suppose they put on there? I know it's
possible to use a program like nlite to create a "mini" version of XP.
Does something similar get installed on these laptoys?
 
<snipped>

Shenan Stanley wrote:
In the end - a standard Windows XP installation with all sorts of
extras will not likely be above about 4.5GB to 9GB in size.
<snipped>
In another thread, a poster was talking about his Asus mini-laptop.
The drive is only 4GB! What do you suppose they put on there? I
know it's possible to use a program like nlite to create a "mini"
version of XP. Does something similar get installed on these
laptoys?

When I say "all sorts of extras"...

- Windows XP Professional w/SP3
- 7-Zip
- Adobe Flash Player ActiveX
- Adobe Flash Player Plugin
- Adobe Shockwave Player
- Alt-Tab Task Switcher Powertoy for Windows XP
- AVG Free
- CmdHere Powertoy For Windows XP
- Foxit Reader
- ImgBurn
- Java(TM) 6
- Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1
- Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
- Microsoft Compression Client Pack 1.0 for Windows XP
- Microsoft Silverlight
- Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable
- Mozilla Firefox
- Mozilla Thunderbird
- OpenOffice
- Paint.NET
- PDFCreator
- QuickTime
- Real Alternative
- Shockwave Director
- Tweak UI
- Windows Internet Explorer 7
- Windows Media Player 11

That's about 4.05 GB of space. Windows XP wasn't 'stripped' in any special
way (Didn't install the games I think... No IIS.)

The 4.5-9GB is with Microsoft Office 2007 and all sorts of other
applications installed. A Netbook or whatever you want to call the things
are not likely (with a 4GB drive) to have all of that.
 
Shenan said:
<snipped>

Shenan Stanley wrote:

<snipped>


When I say "all sorts of extras"...

- Windows XP Professional w/SP3
- 7-Zip
- Adobe Flash Player ActiveX
- Adobe Flash Player Plugin
- Adobe Shockwave Player
- Alt-Tab Task Switcher Powertoy for Windows XP
- AVG Free
- CmdHere Powertoy For Windows XP
- Foxit Reader
- ImgBurn
- Java(TM) 6
- Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1
- Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0
- Microsoft Compression Client Pack 1.0 for Windows XP
- Microsoft Silverlight
- Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Redistributable
- Mozilla Firefox
- Mozilla Thunderbird
- OpenOffice
- Paint.NET
- PDFCreator
- QuickTime
- Real Alternative
- Shockwave Director
- Tweak UI
- Windows Internet Explorer 7
- Windows Media Player 11

That's about 4.05 GB of space. Windows XP wasn't 'stripped' in any
special way (Didn't install the games I think... No IIS.)

The 4.5-9GB is with Microsoft Office 2007 and all sorts of other
applications installed. A Netbook or whatever you want to call the
things are not likely (with a 4GB drive) to have all of that.

Good point.
 
Good list! Let me add the Outlook pst file (if people use Outlook). These
things can become monsters!!! I should note I use 2003 so I don't know if
more current versions still operate the same way.

The file(s) can be compressed. File>Data File Management>select a file and
select compress.

This may not get back more than a few hundred meg but, if users use the
technique I do where I create a new pst each year thus creating an archive
for each past year (I do remove the oldest one after a few years), there can
be a number of psts. To keep the old ones from being too big I go through a
thorough delete in all to prior year pst folders (inbox, sent, delete) and
then run the compress.

Let me also reinforce your advice on running the Disk Cleanup utility
periodically and making sure the temp internet files also get deleted now and
then.

Finally, buying an external HD to store very large files you don't want to
delete makes a huge difference. I actually have 3 of them, a couple 160G and
one considerably larger. I use the large one on my Mac desktop which also
functions as a sort of data server and one of the 160s sits right next to
where I use my laptop for backups and for large file storage.

Today you can get an incredible amout of EHD space for the buck.

Hope this adds to the discussion.

Tom
 
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