Large Windows 7 Installer and winsxs Folders - 50% of partition

Greetings!

I've been having trouble for several months now with my file folders getting too large. Normally, I can clean up my temporary folders with cCleaner or by using the Disc Cleanup tool. This usually takes care of the large "AppData" folder. The trouble I'm seeing now is that my "Installer" and "winsxs" folders continue to grow. Currently, Installer is at 14.4 Gb and winsxs is at 11.3 Gb.

I have read several posts here and a few internet articles discussing options like turning off hibernate mode, emptying the AppData folder, and running cCleaner. These don't address issues in Installer or winsxs though. I tried deleting applications that I don't use. There are some that I'm not sure that I use but may be part of some Excel or VBA pack that I need so I don't delete those. I also ran the msizap.exe application but can't seem to reduce the size of those folders.

I'm not sure if this helps but I ran SpaceSniffer to get an idea of where all my space was being used. In there, the application is telling me that some of these larger .msi or .msp files haven't been accessed in over a year while some of the smaller files haven't been accessed in over 4 years. I'm not sure if that matters but it seems like there could be some house keeping done on those files.

Any help anyone can give is greatly appreciated. Thanks, in advance, for any help you can give me.

Michael

The SSD is 100 Gb but the partition this is on has 49.2 Gb of usable space. It seems odd that over half of that volume is taken up by Windows files.

Also, I've looked around this and other forums and a few people mentioned that these files were quite large. I have had this computer for 4 years. Disc space issues only arose about a year ago when I started grad school and began using my laptop more. I'm not sure if that has a connection to anything but I figured I throw it out there. Should I just add more space to that partition?

Thanks for the help!

I also noticed that there are several versions of MS Visual C++ in my removable programs. I'm thinking that I can uninstall more programs but I'm not sure what will impact using certain MS Office programs like Excel. I play with VBA a bit and don't want to have issues there.

Any recommendations on how to figure out what to delete?

When you run Disk Cleanup, do you run it as admin and clean out Windows Update files?

If you can post screenshots of the Programs and Features list and we can help you pick out some things to uninstall.
Screenshots and Files - Upload and Post in Seven Forums

I would not bother uninstalling the various versions of MS Visual C++. That is only a few MBs.

Do you have Adobe's PDF reader? That can take up a lot more space than it claims.



SumatraPDF is only 11MB.