Windows 7 Weird files on the C drive
Windows 7 Weird files on the C drive
Hello, welcome to Windows! You just completed a fresh installation and everything seems to be working. I noticed some unusual files on the C drive that weren’t there before, and they have locks on them. You want to remove them and understand why they’re locked? It might be related to the Windows Update System you used—WSUS offline. If you’re setting up Windows as your main OS and moving away from macOS, let me know how I can help further.
Interesting point. Unfortunately, I don’t have the details, but I’d like to understand too since these situations come up often. On my setup, the files didn’t appear on C, but they were mapped to another drive, which might explain why they show up there instead.
These are remnants from updates or Office installations (though I’m not sure). Visual Studio and similar redistributable versions by another name.
They represent the MD5 or SHA1 values of Windows update files. This improves search speed and accuracy since multiple patches with identical names won't share the same hash or HMAC. You can check them via a search engine for md5 sha1. If the files are more than 72 hours old, consider deleting them as they may be safely removed. The Disk Clean-up Wizard typically skips these directories. A 32-character hexadecimal code (letters and numbers) can encode over 2^128 unique values, making storage management complex. Windows updates are saved in specific locations and often moved to the disk with available space before installation. These folders aren't created by Steam.