sides of march (Brian DeMarzo)

My laptop has two hard drives — a 128GB SSD and a 1TB old school hard drive (taking the place of the DVD drive, which I never used). I love the SSD, but it’s size limits it to the operating system, some important program files, and a handful of documents.

Every now and then, it fills up. I recently found a silent disk space usage offender: Microsoft’s Web Platform Installer. Apparently, the Web Platform Installer (WebPI) caches all installer files to a local folder, and never deletes them. Which isn’t a problem if you have plenty of disk space, but for me, it’s a problem.

The path to the WebPI installer cache folder is “%LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\Web Platform Installer\installers” – where the variable LOCALAPPDATA points to a folder in your user profile directory. For example, on my machine, the full path is C:\Users\demarzo\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Web Platform Installer\installers.

Deleting all the files in this folder is safe, as the WebPI will simply re-download what it needs when it needs it, which should be perfectly fine for most people who don’t make a habit of repeatedly reinstalling the same version of software over and over again. For me, it saved over 1GB of disk space. Which tells me, among other things, I install a lot of software!