Windows Installer Cleanup Utility

Freeing up space on your hard disks is an ever ongoing battle for some people, for instance if you at some point decided on a too small system partition (“10 Gigs must surely be enough?”).

So in the Windows directory (on Windows XP at least) there is a folder called “Installer” where many install files will be found. It may be tempting to just delete all files here, freeing up many gigs of space, but that could cause problems later, for instance if you want to upgrade some program that needs the old version to be uninstalled first.

So this is where the Windows Installer Cleanup Utility comes into play. Read this excellent blog post on where to get it and how to use it: http://blogs.msdn.com/heaths/archive/2007/01/31/how-to-safely-delete-orphaned-patches.aspx

Essentially after installing the utility, you may run a command that will delete orphaned installation files, that is install files for programs that are no longer on your system.

I managed to free up enough space to install MS VS 2008 Professional… :)

Syncroniziong files with FreeCommander and Compare It!

Up until now I have mostly used SourceSafe and TFS for comparing files. Recently I had a situation where I had to do a so called “Baseless Merge” in TFS. This worked quite well for most files. Then there were some files that were not as easy to merge. So a manual merge was required. Not being quite happy with the file comparing offered by VS, I searched and found a nice option:

• Use FreeCommander to find all files that have differences.
• Use Compare It! to compare and syncronize the contents of files.

To be able to use the “Compare left and right sides” option in FreeCommander, you need to go into Extras –> Settings in FreeCommander, in the Programs section, and set “Compare files” to “C:\Program Files\Compare It!\wincmp3.exe” assuming that’s where Compare It! is installed.

FreeCommander may be found at http://www.freecommander.com.

Compare It! may be found at http://www.grigsoft.com.

I think using these two great tools together is synergy in action!

TIP: Defragment your VMs and VPCs

I have several VMs (VMWare) and VPCs (MS VPC), and one of them in particular has been performing worse and worse, so I thought it could be good to defragment it.

Now there’s internal fragmentation and there’s external fragmentation (just like indexes in SQL Server :P). The internal fragmentation is handled using the windows defragmentation tool inside the VM or VPC. External fragmentation occurs if you have set your disks to grow incrementally as needed. You could also say that all the space for your virtual disks should be reserved, and if your physical disks were defragmented in the first place, there would be no external fragmentation of your virtual disks. But if you let them grow incrementally, or your physical disk was fragmented when you created the virtual disk, there might be some fragmentation.

So I found this excellent tool from Sysinternals: http://technet.microsoft.com/nb-no/sysinternals/bb897428(en-us).aspx

Now I don’t need to defragment the whole physical disk. I can just defragment one file at a time. Should save me some time :)