I’ve now been working with my virtual dev-machine for about one year, and it starts to show. I have installed quite a rig of software like SharePoint, Visual Stduio 2008 and 2010, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007 yada-yada-yada.

I just realized that also keeping always up-to-date with all updates and service packs does has some impact on the available disk-space. I know that Windows 2008 itself is not suited for a small drive, but I still wondered how much space the windows-folder could consume.

So I looked into the windows-folder to get a broad overview of what’s actually happening there. And I noticed that the installer-folder is actually eating up quite some space.

Luckily I found a couple of great posts by Heath Steward about the PatchCache folder. To control the size of the PatchCache folder you also might want to take a look at the MaxPatchCacheSize in the windows registry.

For me, that re-gained me about 2.6 GB of disk-space. For a virtual machine running on a laptop this is quite something.

BTW: this is also applicable to other OS, like Windows 7, Vista, XP …

I just hope, that this will not haunt me some time in the future – but then again, it’s just a dev-machine.