Clear things safely from Windows\Installer folder?

Hey all - I have a lady who asked me to do an SSD upgrade on her Toshiba laptop running Win10 (latest version).

It's got a 500GB drive and the drive I purchased for the upgrade is a 256GB Crucial MX500 SSD. I purchased a smaller one because I know she has very few programs and files on the machine...but...

The thing is, even though she has next to no programs and very little data on her laptop, the Windows\Installer folder is taking up 140GB of space!?!?



Is there a safe way to clear some of this junk from the Windows/Installer folder? I mean, it HAS to be junk, she's got next to nothing on the machine! Orphaned installers or the like maybe...?

Thanks for any suggestions!

Review this thread:

Installer folder cleanup. Clean msp & msi patches marked as superseded

Ah, thanks!

I had actually found WICleanUp already and am running a scan with it as we speak! So it's a safe and legit way to remove ONLY orphaned files?

Can't say for sure. It works fine for me but I don't have MS Office or Adobe products installed and other members commented that "Patch Cleaner" (another cleanup utility) screwed up their installs.

We say it so many times. If you have any concerns create a system image backup that you can restore.

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OldNavyGuy said:

That "junk" is required.

Used by the Windows Installer to update and remove applications, as well as the patches that have been applied.

I would run Disk Cleanup and remove the junk that is not needed.

Disk Cleanup found 233mb of things to remove. You can't tell me an OS that supposedly requires '32gb' needs an installer folder containing enough items to be over 4 times larger than the entire OS....? Because that makes absolutely no sense...not trying to be a jerk, I just can't see how that's possible. I have a Win10 desktop, same OS version, i.e. current) with way more software installed and files on the HDD than she does on her laptop and my Installer folder is only 4GB....

If the program is still installed it's best to leave it unless you know that it never requires updates or uninstalling.

I found one item that could be removed:

If you just use MsiZap. exe G it should only remove orphans.

In most cases if you remove the installer - uninstall will fail but simply re-installing the program allows uninstall to work.

Just ran it again:

For deeper clean:

Download Dism++ - MajorGeeks


Just scan initially and check what is found.