Comments on: Tip of the day: Safely discard SP2 uninstall files

By: Tech on Tour » Blog Archive » Removing Hotfix and Service Pack Uninstall Files Safely

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 11:19:15 +0000

[...] Ed Bott’s Windows Expertise: Tip of the Day: Safetly Discard SP2 Unistall Files [...]

By: David

David — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 03:00:58 +0000

Do not delete the $hf_mig$ folder. Windows needs this to install the most current file, if you download a hotfix that contains an earlier version of the same file.

By: Raj

Raj — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 19:50:32 +0000

Thanks for the great tip. What about the folder $hf_mig$ Can this be deleted too ??

By: Scott

Scott — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 00:24:53 +0000

Ed,

Thanks so much for this little tip.

I have a Sony Vaio. In their infinite wisdom, Sony partioned the C drive to 16 gigs. I should have reformatted it from the get go but since I didn’t, I’ve been fighting space issues ever since.

Safely getting rid of some of this garbage was a huge help.

By: John (at Microsoft)

John (at Microsoft) — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 17:13:28 +0000

You can also back them up to a CD before deleting them; that way if you ever need to uninstall you can copy them back to the hard disk and uninstall.

Uninstalling hotfixes or service packs tends to be something you either discover you need to do shortly after install (hours or days) or you probably don’t need to uninstall them at all, so it is usually safe to delete (or back up and delete) if they are more than a few weeks old.

By: Neil T.

Neil T. — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 12:58:31 +0000

This is probably more of an issue of those users still using FAT32 on their drives, since those folders won’t be compressed and could therefore be taking up a lot of space. At least they are compressed on NTFS drives.

By: Bill Hutchison's Journal

Bill Hutchison's Journal — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 12:21:05 +0000

Safely Remove Hotfix and Service Pack Uninstall Files

Ed Bott's got a good article about how to safely remove uninstall files from your Windows XP installation. It's a question that I have often asked myself, but never really enough to go out searching for it. So today when the answe…