After pondering for a while on whether to install Adobe Creative Cloud for a week or so, I took the plunge. Uninstalled Adobe CS v5.5, ran the Adobe Cleanup Script and CCleaner just to make doubly sure Adobe hadn’t left any crap behind.
I went to explorer and saw I only had 37Gb free on my 128Gb SSD. What the fuck! Where’s all my hard drive space gone?
Quickly checking with Tree Size, I see my c:/windows/system32/config directory is FUCKING huge, and the main culprit is *.regtrans-ms files. All 37,000 of them, taking up close to 18Gb of space. Most seemed to be only 512k in size.
These regtrans-ms files are rollback files for the registry, and since no one seems to know whether they’re need or not, I thought fuck it and went to delete them.
Deleting that amount of files is quicker in a DOS prompt, but that didn’t work even in adminstrator mode so had to revert to the tedious job of deleting them all in Windows Explorer. Five minutes later and my hard disk is looking more healthy.
So if your Windows 8 PC is running ok, but noticing disk space disappearing, check your c:/windows/system32/config directory for these bloody files.