Safe way (or program) to delete unnecessary .dll and .msp files?

Hi all, first time poster here.

 

Recently, I have been running out of disk space at an alarming rate. I was forced to delete many "unnecessary" files (photos and games) that I wanted to keep. Yet, every few days, I would get a notification saying that my disk is full.

 

So I downloaded WinDirStat and ran it, and it turns out that nearly 40% of the memory on my computer is being used by .dll and .msp files. I looked it up, and these are apparently important for proper functioning of my machine, yet I can't help but feel that many of them are redundant. Is there a way to delete the unnecessary ones? Preferably with a program that does it for you, as I am not nearly as computer savvy as most of the people on this forum.

 

I'm not sure if this is relevant, but some computer specs are:

Lenovo x1 Carbon

Windows 7 Pro, Service Pack 1

Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-3667U CPU @ 2.00 GHz

64 bit

 

Thanks for any help!

Hi chief10

What's the size of your hard drive?

Also, it is risky to delete blindly .dll and .msp files on your system. You could end up deleting critical Windows system file, or installers (.msp) which would cripple the programs you have installed, and you wouldn't be able to repair, nor uninstall them properly in the future.

There's an article on Raymond.cc proposing three programs that can help clean MSP files, but I wouldn't try any of them, since the first one is discontinued and even Microsoft doesn't recommend using it anymore, and the two others are manual so you have to be very, very careful when using them.

https://www.raymond.cc/blog/safely-delete-unused-msi-and-mst-files-from-windows-installer-folder/

It's normal for .dll and .msp files to take a lot of space on a system and you are right on the fact that there's redundancy with .dll files that are from the Windows system itself, but it's the way it works, and deleting even one of them can create corruption on your system.

Hi Aura, thanks for the response!

 

Well my C drive is 144 GB, and I only have about 400 MB free after everything I've deleted. Is there anything else that I could do to free up memory, like defragmenting, etc.? I think this computer is a solid-state drive, so maybe it wouldn't do anything? Is it also possible to reinstall windows while keeping all of my files on an external hard drive? Or would the bloat just get saved along with everything else onto the hard drive?

You should never defrag a SSD, this will just hurt its lifespan more than anything else. And it's possible for you to reinstall Windows cleanly (wipe the partition it's installed on, and reinstall it on it) while your files are saved somewhere else, yes.

You could move games and video files...from your O/S drive to an external or secondary drive.  I don't believe there is any benefit/reason for such to be on the Windows drive.

 

Louis