Safe to delete windows update files?

freebooter · 26 Apr 2006 at 21:23

I have just done a fresh winXP install and I am trying to clean it up before making a backup. I have downloaded all the windows updates and this has left loads of uninstall files in the system folder, eg $NtUninstallKB873339$ etc. These take up about 190MB and as I can't see me wanting to uninstall security updates I would like to get rid of them.

Is it safe for me to simply delete them or is there another way?

thanks

freebooter · 26 Apr 2006 at 22:05

thanks for the reply. Should I just delete them through the file manager or is there some of "uninstalling" them? I know they show up in add/rem prog but I assume that is to uninstall the updats themselves not the backup files?

freebooter · 27 Apr 2006 at 19:08

bledd. said:
use ccleaner to remove all the entries for them..

This is what I was afraid of - that remnents would be left behind if I just deleted the files. Do you mean registry entries?

I have heard of ccleaner but never used it. I tried looking for the others and cleanup seemed to be for getting rid of internet traces and I couldn't find a dl site for the atf one.

Johnny - yep the sw dist folder is about 200MB as well. Do you delete the whole thing or just the contents?

freebooter · 27 Apr 2006 at 19:58

What is the latest version ccleaner then without the yahoo nastiness? I have always been very reluctant to use registry cleaners tbh.

One thing that has occured to me is that win update must keep some kind of record of which updates have been installed. I don't want it to try and dl them all again because I have deleted the log. Do you know how this works?

thanks