Every few days, I would get a notice on my desktop that my disk was too full and I had to clean it up. I run Windows XP Professional. I would allow it to use the clean up utility, which would solve it for a little while. The annoying little pop up started happening more and more frequently.

The utility would always clean up some, but it was freeing up less and less space all the time. I went through and removed a lot of programs I never used. Again, it worked for awhile, but the space always got filled up.

Windows Explorer will tell you how much free space is on the disk, and how much space is used by individual folders and files, but it’s very inadequate for trying to find out what is taking up most of the space. I went to sourceforge.net, a very reliable repository for free software. I found WinDirStat and downloaded it.

Through using WinDirStat, I saw that a lot of my space on my hard disk was taken up by .msp files in the Windows/Installer directory. This discovery led me to the following link on Microsoft’s Support site. I started going through the Windows/Installer directory and deleting some of the larger .msp files after checking them via the method described.

I was able to free up over 2 gigabytes of storage on my hard disk and I didn’t take that as far as I could. It’s a little tedious, but as you do it, you’ll find ways of speeding it up.

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