Despite promising myself that I’d move onto the Linux install, I decided to move onto Windows and the infamous service pack 2. Here’s how I did it; a story of space,installs, panic and relief. I run Windows Update and get offered some more security updates, so I download, install and reboot. Go back to the Windows Update, I’m offered SP2, I check my available space. 830 Mb – lets go. Windows Update. Download. Fails on space, it nicely writes some massive check point files which it fails to re-use on restart or delete; I can’t find where they are so I have lost another 200 Mb. I move some more data files off the system, including trying to delete the newsmonster directory (I’ve moved off it, it’s another app. that doesn’t clean up after itself), uninstalled Microsoft Office (Yup I’m one of the few left in the company with permission and licence to use these products) and check again. Ha Ha! 1Gb+, surely this is enough. Lets go again. Using Windows update, happily it recognises that the download has been complete and sets of updating the system. It passes the space check and starts to unpack the files. It moves onto what it calls cleaning up and I start to get space warnings. I observed it as low as 83 Mb but it does complete. Leaving me with 93 Mb on my system. This means that SP2 consumed ~1 Gb of disk space. (I don’t care how plentiful disk has become, I didn’t buy it for someone else to puke over!)

Next I ran my diskhog program and discover.

C:\\WINDOWS\\Software\\Distribution

which had one 500 mb directory, so I deleted the entire contents of this directory, clear out C:\\WUTEMP and delete the Uninstall checkpoints (which in retrospect was a mistake; they ain’t that large) in the C:\\WINDOWS directory. I checked the space again and I’ve got a Gig of space free.

There a couple of niggles about the upgrade. A bunch of file associations have changed, Microsoft seem to think I want their security centre running, they’re wrong, but I have a nicely up to date patched Windows XP partition. 🙂

ooOOOoo

Originally posted on my sun/oracle blog, republished with a minor change here in Feb 2016.

Laptop Diaries VI
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