Can I delete these files without my computer dying?? :)

The files/folders I would like to dump are located in the C:/windows section.. in the software distribution folder.

There are about 12 folders with huge long meaningless names (letters&numbers mixed) with random things inside each folder.

Are these important? My security software keeps getting hung up when trying to scan these files, and it prevents me from doing a full system scan.

Im just wondering if these files can be removed, I would just delete them, but Im hesitant to do so with anything in the Windows Folder

Thanks

 

If you don't know what they are, don't do anything and get a tech to look at it.

 

If the folders are named like this:

$NtUninstallKB938828$

Then it's safe to delete them. (note the $NtUninstall bit. That's the important part). If not, then I wouldn't delete them until you knew what they were for.

 

Everything in C:\windows\software distribution\downloads\ can be deleted. They are the windows update downloads used to install the updates. The folder gets pretty large after a lot of downloads. The encrypted files located at the beginning of C:\Windows that follow the naming convention mentioned by Pitabread can also be deleted; also part of Windows Update downloads. You will loose your ability to uninstall the related updates if you do the deletes. And you'll gain an amazing amount of drive space.

 

I personally wouldn't mess with it. Just leave it...Windows is picky about needing certain files for startup. You may just not be able to start up anymore after deleting any unknown files

 

Generally, that's not likely, since Windows NT5 and up (That is, 2000 and higher) all have WFP (Windows File Protection) that does not allow the deletion of critical Windows system files.

However, that's not to say that nothing will happen if you go on a mass deleting spree, more often then not, you'll probably mess up some softwares from starting up, or functioning, or disrupt codecs by deleting their .dll's.

Oh, another thing is that, don't delete "$hf_mig$" folder, no matter how large it gets! It holds a cache of all the latest and up-to-date updates, patches and .dll's for your system that it uses to compare with newly downloaded "updates". If the patch in "$hf_mig$" is actually a newer version then the one you just downloaded, it won't install the newly downloaded update. This prevents patches that are actually "older" than the one on your system to overwrite the newer patch.

 

Just backup your impotat things beforeand yuourset

 

Important files for the system are protected and can't be deleted or scanned and if you managed to do so heaven help you. MS should hide all these files so people who start tinkering wouldn't notice them, myself included.