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 Clean msp & msi patches marked as superseded

Hello @gvp9000,

Have you seen this Tutorial? => Clean Up Component Store (WinSxS folder) in Windows 10

I hope this helps!

gvp9000 said:

Has anyone tried this script ?
Presenting… StartComponentCleanup for MSI (including Office) | My Digital Life Forums

It cleaned up about 6Gb of files in my windows\installer directory most of them was old Office 2016 patches.

Is there a downside of cleaning up old and marked as superseded msp & msi patches in installer directory ?

Win 10 version 2004

There's no info in your link without crating an account. Or at least for me content is hidden.

Consider this:

PatchCleaner - safely clean your windows installer directory | homedev - software development out of the box

When applications are installed and updated on the Windows Operating System a hidden directory "c:\Windows\Installer" is used to store the installer (.msi) files and the patch (.msp) files.
Generally these files are important as during updating, patching or uninstalling software it will use the .msi/.msp files. If you blanketly delete all the files in this folder, you will find yourself needing to rebuild windows.

Note warnings here:

Download PatchCleaner - MajorGeeks

It is best to use the "move the files to another drive" option just in case.

I've stopped recommending PatchCleaner as a cleanup tool at Win10.Guru for that reason. I believe that DISM /online /cleanup-image /startcomponentcleanup does more or less the same cleanup work anyway.
Thanks for sharing that important observation @eLPuSHeR.
--Ed--

OK thanks, @gvp9000. Good to know. I wonder if the homedev guys got tired of keeping PatchCleaner up-to-date. I see it's now up on SourceForge but it hasn't been touched since November of 2016 (2 years, 7 months).
Thanks again,
--Ed--

I found a useful story named "4 ways to safely delete unused MSI and MSP files from Windows Installer..." The author provides a link to a free (and easily accessible) tool named WICleanup (Windows Installer UnUsed Files Cleanup Tool). Like @Callender, I was not permitted to access the MyDigitalLife item. But this tool is readily available and appears to do the job, and runs as an .exe file.
HTH,
--Ed--

Hmm...

There doesn't appear to be a problem, so why create one?
You could use CCleaner (free) to perform a registry scan and delete old entries it deems are safe.

That's about it. Doesn't clean those files you are seeking though. Look at the Custom Clean options.

Some people reload their systems and start fresh.
Just make a restorable (and verifiable) backup before doing that.

HTH



P.S. If you are short on space, I could understand, if not, no worries.