Save Significant Disk Space by Setting MaxPatchCacheSize to 0

A little over two years ago, I wrote a post about installing Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1, in which I mentioned setting the MaxPatchCacheSize registry setting to 0 (in order to save some significant disk space while installing the service pack). [Note that the credit for this trick really goes to Heath Stewart -- as I mentioned in my original post.]

I've also mentioned in various posts that I make heavy use of virtualization in the "Jameson Datacenter" (a.k.a. my home lab) and that I prefer to keep my VHDs reasonably small. This is especially valuable when, for example, I need to copy a VM from one of my home servers and take it "on the road" with me to a customer site.

As such, one of the first things that I typically do when building out a new VM is to run the following from a command prompt:
reg add HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Installer /v MaxPatchCacheSize /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f

Then I move on to installing products based on the intended purpose of the VM.

Read more: Random Musings of Jeremy Jameson

Posted via email from jasper22's posterous