ASUS eeePC Cleaner Script

The last few days I’ve been working on refurbishing an older eeePC. This netbook has a 4GB SSD drive in it and while Windows XP will install, it will quickly fill up the drive with update and other temporary files. It becomes an issue when you’re faced with a lot of updates and there just isn’t enough room to extract them all. I looked online and came up with a batch script that will clean temporary folders and Windows Update folder as well. This will allow you to install several updates, restart, run the script and continue to run updates without running out of drive space.

Enough blabbering, here’s the code:
@echo off
echo Cleaning eeePC... Code mashed together by Nate Rowe www.natescomp.com
net stop wuauserv
del "c:\windows\softwaredistribution" /q /s
del "c:\windows\temp" /q /s
del "c:\documents and settings\%USERNAME%\local settings\temp" /q /s
rd "c:\recycler" /q /s
net start wuauserv

Stick that in Notepad and save it as a “whatever.bat” file. Run it and you should be good to perform more updates 🙂 Hopefully someone gets some use out of this, I know I did.

*EDIT*
I forgot to mention that this script is for Windows XP. Windows Vista and 7 (and 8) have different user directories as well as a different location for the recycle bin. But, if you’re faced with a 4GB drive to install on, chances are you’re not going to be using Vista, 7 or 8 🙂

*EDIT 2*
If you’re looking at gaining more free space back, have a look at the Windows folder on your system drive. Inside there are folders that start with a $. They’re generally created as backup files for Windows Updates. I’ve deleted all of mine on the netbook and gained back almost 700MB with no ill issues. I’ve also deleted the “ie8” and “ie8updates” folder from the Windows folder. These were created when updating from IE7 to IE8 on Windows XP. After deleting them, IE still runs fine (not that I’d use it :D).