Windows 11 Installer Folder Size

Forum|Forum|6 months ago
September 26, 2025
2 replies
1749 views

I recenetly had a users laptop using a lot of disk space. I assumed this was either movies or music or other media taking up space. I discoverd the installer folder was filled with old .msi files from updates to the tune of 38GB. So I uninstalled Acrobat in full and the folder size fell by 8GB. I then used a script to delete unused files in that folder since it did not matter that I deleted them as Acrobat is now uninstalled. It got rid of 30GB of old unused .msi and other install files that were never needed by Acrobat.

What is going on? All the other programs installed on the computer are using a total of 2.5GB of install files but Acrobat used 8GB plus 30GB that was never needed.

How is this preventable to stop Acrobat conintuly filling up sapce on the computer.

B252060205cp0

Participant

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Randy Hagan

Community Expert

You've got me curious.

I checked my latest Acrobat install on a Windows PC (C:\Program Fies\Adobe\Acrobat DC) and it's about 2.8GB. And .msi files are Windows installer files. You've deleted them, so it's hard to tell if they were multiple instances of downloading a single installer file, installers for several different versions of software, or some other kind of odd anomaly we can't otherwise account for.

This is a user-to-user forum, and I'm an end user just like you. Or more like your user, actually. Based on the information you've shared here I can't begin to advise you without a bunch more information. If you could provide information on what version of Windows, what version of Acrobat and ideally what the names of the .msi files you encountered, maybe I can help. But not without more information.

Sorry,

Randy

D

default25029510nlu198Author

Participant

The files are just signed random adobe msi files from past updates located in C:\Windows\Installer like db98w.msi. Currently on Windows Pro 11 24H2 and Adobe Acrobat 2025.001.20693. On this machine those older required files are not removed upon an update or uninstalltion. I had to use filetreeexplored to find how the drive was filled up as this is a hidden directory that I should have not needed modify but when you have 256GB laptop 38GB of space being used, which is larger than the windows install, is a propblem. We are currently looking at all machines with Acrobat installed.

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