Clean up SoftwareDistribution and Downloaded Installations

With crap loads of Windows updates and temporary installation files that apps generate, it doesn’t take much to fill up the C: drive. Those of you who are regular Windows users might have noticed that over the time of few months to years, Windows starts taking a lot of space in the C: drive.

The Program Files and the Windows folder itself get bigger substantially. Of course, you can delete stuff and uninstall applications which you don’t use to recover some of that space, but most of the time, it is not enough.

If you are running low on storage space, you can actually use the Disk Cleanup utility in Windows to get some of that space back. But, there is another way we can get more space out of this process. So, the C: drive has two large folders which store intermediate data for Windows OS. These are SoftwareDistribution and Downloaded Installations.

In this post, I’ll be discussing the way to safely delete the SoftwareDistribution and Downloaded Installations Folders on Windows 10 PC.

Steps for removing the SoftwareDistribution and Downloaded Installations Folders

These two folders consist a lot of data and, they get clogged with lots of unnecessary files. The type of files contained in these folders range from temporary installation files to the extracted files from the apps you installed. Once the app is installed, most of the files should be removed, but many programs don’t do that automatically.

If you are one of those who install a lot of apps on their PC, these two folders will most probably be filled with a lot of junk. Let’s see how to clear them.

Safe delete SoftwareDistribution Folder

• Press Windows + R to open the Run box.
• Type C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution and press Enter.
• Select all the files in this folder by pressing Ctrl + A.
• Right-click on the selected files and then click on Delete.

This will clear all the junk from the SoftwareDistribution folder to free up some space in the C: drive. Now we clear the DownloadedInstallations folder.

Safe delete Downloaded Installations Folder

• Press Windows + R to open the Run box.
• Type C:\Windows\Downloaded Installations and press Enter.
• Select all the files in this folder by pressing Ctrl + A.
• Right-click on the selected files and then click on Delete.

Clean these two folders, and you will certainly gain a few gigabytes of storage in your C: drive. Since you are messing with the Windows files, please make sure that you have a backup handy in case of an anomaly.