Clean recycle bin for all users

July 20, 2019

The Emergency 🔔

Notification, there is an emergency, you need to connect to a remote desktop to run some transact SQL queries, you do it, press F5 and … 💥

An error occurred while executing batch. Error message is: There is not enough space on the disk....

You realize that there isn't enough space on C - nothing, zero, nada - It turns out that SSMS needs space to write some temp files on C:\Users\...\AppData\Local\Temp so it can process the results of your query.

Your first reaction, of course, is to clean temp files, your recycle bin, old documents, maybe execute the cleanup wizard in windows but if you are lucky you'll get only a few megabytes

WinDirStat

Suddenly you remember this amazing app WinDirStat, so you install it and let it do its work. Thanks to this, you'll find two issues:

Clean Recycle Bin for Everybody

Issue 1. Your partners aren't careful with their recycle bins

Open your terminal as administrator and run :

Clean recycle bin

            

rd /s c:\$Recycle.Bin

If somebody complains you could tell: Don't blame me, it was in the recycle bin for a reason

Windows Installer Folder

Issue 2. Windows is messy with the cleanup of \Windows\Installer folder

This should be addressed more carefully, it's a known issue that Windows Installer folder gets big especially when you install a lot of applications and share your machine with more users In short, the issue is that when you uninstall an app, their update / installation package is not always deleted It is supposed that you shouldn't touch this folder because could lead to update or install issues, but as always is a trade off, you should proceed carefully.

So the fix is to find orphaned installation/update files that belong to apps that are not installed anymore in the system.

Manually run the next VBA Script that shows the files that we should KEEP in the system, everything that is not in the output file could be deleted

VBA Script

            

'' Identify which patches are registered on the system, and to which
'' products those patches are installed.
''
'' Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
''
'' THIS CODE AND INFORMATION IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY
'' KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE
'' IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND/OR FITNESS FOR A
'' PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

'Option Explicit

Dim msi : Set msi = CreateObject("WindowsInstaller.Installer")

'Output CSV header
WScript.Echo "The data format is ProductCode, PatchCode, PatchLocation"
Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objFile = objFSO.CreateTextFile("output.txt", True)
objFile.WriteLine "ProductCode, PatchCode, PatchLocation"
objFile.WriteLine ""
' Enumerate all products
Dim products : Set products = msi.Products
Dim productCode

For Each productCode in products
' For each product, enumerate its applied patches
Dim patches : Set patches = msi.Patches(productCode)
Dim patchCode

    For Each patchCode in patches
    	' Get the local patch location
    	Dim location : location = msi.PatchInfo(patchCode, "LocalPackage")
        objFile.WriteLine productCode & ", " & patchCode & ", " & location

    Next

Next
WScript.Echo "Data written to output.txt, these are the registered objects and SHOULD be kept!"

Thanks to Raymond.cc for the article, you could explore the article to find other ways to clean up the windows installer folder.

Hopefully, with these two tips you could claim precious space for your computer