After installing WinXP SP2 I noticed my C drive, which is a bit on the small side, lost quite a big chunk of disk space. I knew SP2 created a big restore point, but unfortunately I was unable to remove this one by first making a new one, and then removing all old restore points using the Disk Cleanup tool, because my C was under 200 MB space… aaargh!
Anyway, time to look a bit further into this matter, so I hit Google with some queries and came up with some nifty tips on how to cleanup after installing SP2. The best tips are in this usenet post, but also check out the rest of the thread if you like. It also links to this AumHa forum post containing a few more useful tips.
If your system drive is low on disk space before installing SP2, don’t use the Windows Update btw… it’ll just fill up your harddrive, crash with an error, and leave your disk bloated with install files…
Those files are stored in %windir%\SoftwareDistribution\Download\ btw, so that’s the ones you need to wipe out to get that precious disk space back and retry installing using the network download
Instead, it’s better to use the network installation package which you can download on whatever drive has enough space.
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