Thinkpads Forum

In another thread rkawakami wrote:

Another thing to look at if you want to reclaim some disk space is in the "Add or Remove Programs" utility in "Control Panel". Scroll down to the Java entries and uninstall all but the latest one you have (currently, "Java(TM) 6 Update 7" is the newest released version). Each installation of Java takes a little bit over 100MB and it never seems to uninstall the previous versions.

So I checked and I have:

JS2E Runtime Environment 5.0 Update 5 (118MB)
Java(TM) 6 Update 2 (111MB)
Java(TM) 6 Update 3 (111MB)
Java(TM) 6 Update 4 (137MB)
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment 6 Update 1 (134MB)

What the difference b/t a 'Runtime Environment' and not? What should I keep and what delete? That's a lot of dead space if I don't need it . . .

You 'could' delete them all, then goto the sun website or java.com and get the latest and install it, but as for the total disk cost the end result would be about the same. The updates don't preserve copies of every previous file.

So in other words, there's nothing lost from leaving it alone.

Well, I experimented before I got your reply and it seems that there are copies of every previous version. In C:\Program Files\Java there were folders for:

jre1.5.0_05
jre1.6.0_02
jre1.6.0_03
jre1.6.0_04
jre1.6.0_05

Right-click -> Properties showed ~70MB per folder. I uninstalled all but the latest version with Add/Remove Programs and the other folders disappeared. And I gained ~300MB of disk space; anal, I know, what with a 100GB drive, but hey--300MB is 300MB . Java should change their update process!