so its safe to delete the "protected" files?

 

Nobody knows, eh

 

after some research i found that you can delete everything inside C:\WINDOWS\ServicePackFiles\i386, but don't delete the i386 folder itself. this is if you have service pack 2 installed and are happy w/it (you wouldn't uninstall). that folder had over 500 MB for me.

 

nice, i found 275 mb worth
after everything, i think i gained around 5gigs.

 

definately disable system restore. the thing is pointless, eats up a ton of disk space and system resources and doesn't work very well. the one time i tried it, it took forever and it fucked my windows up so bad that i had to re-install from scratch.
i believe this is where the update installs are kept. you probably won't be able to uninstall the updates if you delete these, but who would want to?

 

Where did you find this information?

 

hopefully i still have the URLs in my browser history. i'm at work right now so i'll look for them when i get home.

 

oh, and there are some other places where i saved around 200-300 MB. there are unnecessary copies of dlls somewhere in c:\windows.

 

http://www.iamnotageek.com/printer-69.html

I dunno how I feel about deleting it :happysad:.

 

i did #2 and #3.