Thinkpads Forum

My T61 is getting old but seems to work reliably, running Win 7 64-bit.
I believe that the Lenovo ThinkVantage Toolbox ("powered by PC-Doctor") software came with the machine originally (it is currently at version 6.0.5849).
It autoruns quarterly to scan the hardware and tell me about system status, such as last backup, amount of disk space available, battery, and updates, and can run diagnostics on the whole system or an individual device if something seems to misbehave. It can also create bootable diagnostic media. Lately it just reminds me to do a backup, and that my C drive is around 80% full.
Actually, this unit has worked pretty well for years, and I don't recall particularly making any important use of LTT.

Today I noticed that I have about 9,000 files called Snapshot_YYYMMDDTime-nnn.xml
located in subdirectories of C:\ProgramData\PCDr\5849
The PCDr directory occupies about half a gigabye of disk space
and there is also a PC-Doctor directory dated 4 years ago.

I just read that there is a similar package or utility called Lenovo Solution Center, which apparently dates from summer 2014 and seems to have the same functions as LTT.

Should I uninstall the old LTT and PC-Doctor programs, and clean up that space?

Is it important and/or useful to use the newer Lenovo Solution Center?

I still have the program called System Update (ver 5.06.007) and it is still offering the occasional update.

Any recommendations will be appreciated.
Thank you.

I can't answer all your questions but I would say that you probably should not remove the LTT / PC Doctor programs as they do a better job (IMHO) at testing the system hardware than LSC. This is especially true if you still have access to the PC Doctor for DOS package as that test suite is not easily available any more (see my .sig).

The few times I ran LSC I was not convinced that it was better at checking all of the subsystems like PC Doctor did. Granted, this was early on when LSC was just released after the contract with PC Doctor was terminated. Things may have changed since then so I would carefully compare what each diagnostc suite is checking before choosing one over the other.

As far as the 500MB of data, I don't know. It could be similar to system checkpoints and that you could safely delete the oldest ones. On the other hand, 500MB will fit on a single CD so you could back them up and delete the lot.

Thank you Ray for another thoughtful reply. I will follow your suggestions.