are these \Update leftovers and safe to delete?

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acz · #1 Post by **acz** » Mon Mar 13, 2006 4:42 pm

I am doing a little housekeeping on my T41p, updating the latest drivers using Software Installer and cleaning old stuff from the hard drive. I noticed that I have a directory called C:\Program Files\IBM\
which contains the following subfolders
\acp
\Wireless
\Access IBM
\Updater (633 files in 87 folders taking up 257 MB)
\Messages By IBM
\Bluetooth Software

I assume that the Updater folder mentioned above is left over from the old IBM Updater program which was supplanted by the ThinkVantage Software Installer last year. I got rid of the IBM Updater a few months ago through Add/Remove programs.

Is it OK to delete that C:\Program Files\IBM\Updater directory (after making a copy on CD)?

Is it OK to delete any of those other subdirs mentioned above?

It seems that there are a lot of duplicate drivers in the c:\DRIVERS directory and in the c:\IBMTOOLS directory. Are any of these safe to delete?

Finally, there are some two-letter subdirs in various places that I think are for different languages such as AR=Arabic, CZ=Czech, HU=Hungarian, etc. Is there any reason to keep those?

Thank you.

hoya · #2 Post by **hoya** » Tue Mar 14, 2006 11:03 am

do NOT delete anything in C:/Program Files/

only use the Add/Remove function in the control panel to remove actual programs.

after making a CD backup, you can delete the contents of C:/Drivers and another one or two folders in the root directory (C:/) that contain IBM's support software. however, these are the installers, which means you would run these apps in order to install the programs, and they will most likely wind up installing to C:/Program Files/IBM

I can't remember the name of those other folders since I no longer have them. perhaps someone else here can help.

davidspalding · #3 Post by **davidspalding** » Sat Mar 18, 2006 9:01 pm

The folders under \drivers and \ibmtools, et al, are used by Software Installer to find updates. It's a bit more complicated than that, but if you want to save space, make backups of those folders, then delete them, but restore them the next time you tell Software Installer to check for updates.

There may be more succinct info in the FAQ and other threads. I'm not an expert on this.

hiyel · #4 Post by **hiyel** » Sun Mar 19, 2006 2:01 pm

I hated the fact that executables of all updates that I installed residing on my hard drive, moreover not just one version of them but every version I downloaded.

So I deleted those folders (c:\DRIVERS and c:\IBMTOOLS), then once run the software updater it didn't find any updates, it didn't even check anythig, and it didn't report the current versions of the softwares either. But the softwares itselfs worked properly. I realised I messed it up pretty bad. Then I put those folders back (of course I had taken backups). And it started to work again.

So, those folders indeed contain the executables of the updates but they also contain xml logs of what software is installed and what version. Software Update compares those xml to the ones at ibm server, and decide if you need to d/l anything. If there is no xml, it can't compare and it doesn't report anything.

What I did was, I deleted every single file on those folders except .xml ones. Now I can get reports of what is installed and if there is any updates I need to download. If there are any, I install them, once I'm done, I go and delete them too. They are only about 9 MB, saving me a lot, and a lot of space.

davidspalding · #5 Post by **davidspalding** » Sun Mar 19, 2006 5:26 pm

I've only found 1-2 apps for which I had multiple install folders for ... I think it was software that wasn't updated by SI. Of course they weren't obvious, so I had to be Sherlock Holmes to find them.

XML files? I thought there was another file type, but maybe that was for Download Manager.

kai920 · #6 Post by **kai920** » Thu Jun 29, 2006 2:10 am

hiyel wrote:What I did was, I deleted every single file on those folders except .xml ones. Now I can get reports of what is installed and if there is any updates I need to download. If there are any, I install them, once I'm done, I go and delete them too. They are only about 9 MB, saving me a lot, and a lot of space.

So, for C:\DRIVERS, I can go into each of those directories and delete everything except for the .xml files?

I'm desparately short on space; my partitioned 20gb C: drive has 530MB remaining, causing my machine to run noticeably slower than usual.

C:\IBMTOOLS is 1.30GB
C:\DRIVERS is 640MB

What can I do? Burn those folders onto a DVD like davidspalding suggested?

kai920 · #7 Post by **kai920** » Thu Jun 29, 2006 5:57 am

Ok silly me, I just moved both those folders off to F: partition and freed up the space there. Going to reboot and see if system still works...

davidspalding · #8 Post by **davidspalding** » Thu Jun 29, 2006 6:56 am

Run Disk cleanup (cleanmgr.exe) ... see if that helps. Search on the forum for "cleanmgr /sagerun" to find other threads where we've discussed it.

dsigma6 · #9 Post by **dsigma6** » Thu Jun 29, 2006 7:42 am

ccleaner works well for cleaning up old hotfix uninstallers- on one computer it saved me 300MB.

are these \Update leftovers and safe to delete?

are these \Update leftovers and safe to delete?

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