Remove ability to restore auotomatic updates

This is the best way I could think of to phrase the question to get the desired response.

With the number of updates that come for Windows 7, there must be a lot of space used up by the files which make it possible to uninstall KB updates and hotfixes, and security updates.

Is there any way to get rid of these? It is at least a week since an update was installed, and my system is running fine, so I don't see why I should be able to uninstall the 37 updates to Windows listed in Control Panel - Programs and Features - Installed Updates. Some of them go back nearly a year.

Over time, these backups are going to take up a significant space in the Wiondows partition.

My apologies if the question has already been answered, but couldn't find an answer.

If I understand your question correctly (and I apologize if I've misunderstood), you want to know why you can't uninstall Windows Updates, Hotfixes, etc that go back over a year ago because they're taking up space on your hard drive. Actually, you CAN uninstall them.

Windows Update - Uninstall an Update

But I would strongly caution you not to uninstall anything, especially since your system is running fine. Those updates, fixes, etc are taking care of security breaches, system anomalies, and other issues. Without those updates your system probably wouldn't be running fine. Another consideration is some updates build upon previous updates and future updates may require those older updates to continue protecting your system.

Over time (let's say the next 4 or 5 years - before you buy a new computer) all of those updates will probably take up less than 20GB of hard drive space. With the size of today's drives, that's a very inconsequential amount of space and may contribute about 6 minutes added time to make a system image backup.

Again, if I misunderstood your question, I sincerely apologize.

The equivalent of XP's $NTUninstall folders in Windows 7 are kept in the winsxs folder (C:\windows\winsxs), dont even think of touching that folder, the system heavily relies on them. It keeps older versions of files to keep application compatibility.

The installers, OTOH are stored in C:\windows\softwaredistribution\download folder, they can be deleted without affecting installed updates.

Thanks all, Bill2 is the answer to the question, but not the answer I wanted

My HDD with my system partition and my programs partition is only 80GB (it goes back years) and with enough updates it could get quite full.

But I do have these two partitions regularly cloned to a 1TB drive, so when this happens, or I have a failure, I can just swap the HDDs and be up and running again seamlessly. (I have no urge to start from scratch again.)

I suppose Microsoft had a good reason for doing this.

Useful articles, thanks.