Steam extracting necessary windows files to my D drive?

I'm new to Steam and yesterday when installing some games, it needed various stuff like directx and visual C++(?) to run some stuff, I let it install them as needed and thought nothing of it.

But later when I was checking some files I had stored onto my D drive, I noticed a whole load of files, dll's etc just sat in the D root folder. I assume Steam extracted the files there before installing them as necessary.

Can I just delete them all now, and more to the point, can I change where it extracts all those to, as it is just messy having them all listed there like that. Thanks.

 

Steam shouldn't specifically install things to the D: unless you configured it to. Sometimes the drive with the most free space will by default be used for temporary files during an installation, though. You may be able to delete them, but what I'd suggest is first adding them all to a .zip file, then delete them. Then run for a week or two, test out all your games and apps, and if they still run then delete the .zip. If things break, you can always then unzip the files again to fix it, perhaps even one by one if the error messages tell you enough.

 

Yeah it is installing all things onto C drive as I want. It just seems to be using d drive as a temp cache for some reason. I'll do as you suggest and see how I go

Actually, I found it isn't only steam, even windows is using d as the temp destination. Most annoying!

 

Yeah. There are only a few different types of program installer programs like InstallShield, and one of the common ones uses the drive with the most free space for temp files, and it seems like it isn't great about cleaning them up. I haven't checked into details, though.