I have been cleaning up the hard drive on AntiqueLaptop. I gave this HP laptop to youngest son when he was in high school. Since then youngest son has graduated college, and the high school laptop wasn't cool enough for him, so it came back to me. It has plenty of punch to run all my programs, and I can sit on the deck in summer and web surf with it. When I got it back, the 40 Gig hard drive was full.
Some obvious weeding of music and games, followed by passes with CCleaner, turning off System Restore freed up 10 Gigs or so, enough to install M$ Visual C, all my digital photos, all my back email, lotta stuff.
Then I ran Windirstat. That showed me 2.7 Gigs of recycle bin files that the recycle bin didn't see and would not flush. Some how a second Recycler directory had taken root in Program Files. That's not supposed to happen, but with Windows all things are possible. Explorer failed to delete it. But Windirstat has a zap files feature that did 'em just fine.
Then I found that hidden system
C:\Windows\Installer directory had grown to 1.6 Gigabytes. A real diskhog on a 40 Gig laptop. I was able to recover 0.6 Gigabytes with
Microsoft program MSIZAP.exe. The
Installer directory is a space waster invented to support uninstallation of
Office. It contains hundreds of fat
files with random number names. Some
(but not all) files are obsolete, they belong to old products previously
removed from the system, except the uninstaller leaves the fat files
behind. The MSIZAP.exe program is a DOS
program that with command line switches ! and G will delete any files in the
installer directory that are not referenced in the registry.
Step 1 is to obtain MSIZAP.
This is non trivial because Microsoft has withdrawn it. Apparently Windows 7 and 8 are less robust
than XP, and MSIZAP was breaking something in the "new and improved" Windows versions..
I am still running trusty XP, so I don’t care about breaking Win 7 and 8.
Despite the M$ down check, the program is so useful that private
websites still have it. I found it at: http://majorgeeks.com/downloadget.php?id=4459&file=15&evp=fe1c76da3437592326a3d668d72bf8f5 under the name “msicuu2.exe” Actually msicuu2 is a fancier M$ installer
cleaner upper. The fancier part calls
good old msizap to get the work done.
After downloading and installing the msicuu2 package you will find
msizap.exe in the newly created Program Files/ Windows Installer Clean Up
directory.
Step 2 is to run it.
Do Start -> Run and then open a dos window by typing “Cmd.com” in the
run box. Use the DOS CD command to set
the current directory to c:Program File\ Windows Installer Clean Up. Remember to inclose directory names
containing spaces in double quote marks.
Such as
CD c:\”program files”
Followed by
CD “windows installer clean up” to avoid typing a long filestring in one fell
swoop.
Then execute msizap with the following command line
Msizap !G
Be sure to include the !G command line switches, otherwise
the program may do bad things. On my
machine the msizap issued a couple of “Error 2”
messages and then reported removing about 20 files.
Checking afterwards showed the Windows Installer directory
had shrunk from 1.6 Gig down to 1 Gig.
That's a lot of work for a measly 600 Meg. BTW, I read a lot of web chit chat to the effect that MSIZAP does bad things to Win 7 and 8, and newer versions of Office so beware.
