I was wondering who else here is installing Windows Updates. I used to install them from time to time, but my system has gotten significantly slower and not to talk about my system partition of 50 GB being almost full. :/ Of course there's not only Windows on the system partition, but my Windows folder is still awfully large (far over 20 GB). I am currently in the process of uninstalling all updates manually. Obviously this takes a shitload of time. I have uninstalled all secondary updates (.NET 4, MS Office, some VS related stuff as well, etc.) and I have freed over 4 GB with just that. There were over 50 updates I think. Now I am uninstalling the actual Windows updates (of which there are 130+, but at least it's going very fast).
I was wondering if anybody else had similar experiences with the system slowing down and taking ages to access the HDD after installing a bunch of updates.
I stopped installing updates. It significantly increased my boot time and like you said, took longer to access my hard drive. My Windows folder has reached 27GB. I'm thinking about just reformatting and starting from scratch.
I'm definitely going to reformat my drive. But first I have to make an extensive and organized backup of the non-system drive (safe is safe) and these days I'm a bit busy with other things. Like this Windows should be running fine for at least another year. So maybe in a few months I'll get around reformatting everything.
Windows XP makes backups of all its updates. Everything downloaded from Windows Update is stored in the Windows folder and leads to it being fat.
When I was running XP on a VM on my Mac, I used
http://www.tech-pro.net/windows-update-remover.html
It shows every Windows XP backup folder. If your computer hasn't been crashing and/or there hasn't been a need to uninstall updates, it should be fine to remove the backup folders. The reason why you can't just delete them is that for every update, a registry entry is also made so this has to be deleted along with the update folder. The tool I posted (just saying, not affiliated with this website, so use at your own risk! ) removes both in one go. Only problem is you have to click remove for each update since it doesn't let you select more than one at a time.
Edit: Whoops my bad. I just went and assumed you guys all used XP xD sorry
Anyway, a quick google search returned this:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/4787-63-windows-hotfix-backup-removal
tl;dr: The files that Windows downloads are stored in %systemroot%/SoftwareDistribution/Downloads and it is apparently safe to delete them.
Thanks. This is what I've been looking for.
EDIT: OMG, I found something out. If you move a folder into the recycle bin that would take some time to delete, then go into the recycle bin, try to delete it manually and cancel it before it's done, the folder will disappear from the recycle bin without being completely deleted! This causes folders to stay on your HDD and you can't access to delete them in a normal way.
The way how this is fixed is to turn on hidden and system files, then open the folder $RECYCLE.BIN on every partition that you have and delete the file "Recycle Bin" inside. This will really delete the folder from your HDD and you will get valuable space back. I got almost 10 GB across all my 3 partitions back like that.