Request for Question Clarification by
aht-ga
on
15 Nov 2004 09:52 PST
lrp-ga:
Not quite an Answer yet, as I'd like to have you confirm something more beforehand.
The various Hotfixes and patches on the Add/Remove listing should NOT
be uninstalled, as that will recreate the problems that the
hotfixes/patches were intended to solve. As well, in spite of
Microsoft's best intentions, there is no guarantee that the hotfixes
and patches will uninstall correctly, as there have been multiple
patches released for some of the more common parts of the operating
system over the past couple of years... uninstalling the patches in
the wrong order might lead to bigger problems.
What you CAN do, though, is remove the $NTUNINSTALL... folders hidden
in your Windows directory. While this will prevent the hotfixes and
patches from being uninstalled in the future, that's not really a
problem since you plan on layering SP2 on top of them anyway. As well,
definitely delete any installation files you might have lying around
for those hotfixes and patches.
Before you delete anything, though, please do the following check to
see how much room you will actually free up:
In Windows Explorer, go to the Windows directory (most likely
C:\WINDOWS). Depending on your system settings, you may need to click
a few warnings before you get to see the contents of this directory.
If you have hidden folders viewing enabled (Tools>Folder
Options>View>Show hidden files and folders), you will see a whole
bunch of $NtUninstall... folders. These are the folders containing the
'old' files that were replaced by the hotfix/patch files. If you
select them all then right-click>Properties, you will see how much
disk space is actually used by these folders. In my own case, since
the last time I cleaned it up, I've already accumulated another 80 MB
worth of these uninstall files, plus another 200 MB for the SP2
uninstall folder. Your results will vary.
Please take a look at your uninstall folder sizes to see if it is
worth deleting them, before you do so. If you are really tight on
space, you can also consider enabling compression (if you are using
NTFS) to try to free up more space without having to actually delete
anything else. After you have checked out the amount of space that the
$NTUninstall folders are occupying, let me know if this is enough, or
if you need additional ideas about how to free up more disk space, so
that I can provide it as part of the Answer.
Regards,
aht-ga
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