I’m in a cleaning frenzy today, so using WinDirStat (awesome program, btw) I’ve begun to inspect every little corner of my Windows partition for wasteful unnecessary and leftover files.
One of the places that always bugged my for taking up space is the Windows\Installer folder. Apparently here is where Windows caches all Windows Installer installation packages for later use. But as any other Windows-related activity, it more than often leaves behind a lot of trash…
Digging around for information on how to clean this up, I found this and this, two pages which recommended using a (now hidden) Microsoft utility called MsiZap.exe.
Running it with the G parameter > msizap.exe g
will clean up leftover (orphaned) installation files.
And so it did, shrinking my Windows\Installer folder from 3.6GB to 2.6GB. That’s a 27% decrease in size.