Can the softwaredistribution folder be deleted

Carl Holzhauer This person is a verified professional. Pure Capsaicin. DragonsRule This person is a verified professional. WSUS expert. If you mean by renaming it manually in Windows Explorer, no it does not let me rename it there either.

When I try and rename it after manually stopping all 3 services above , I get the typical "The action can't be completed because the folder or a file in it is open in another program". I just rebooted back to back and after the 2nd reboot the script renamed the folder. Any idea what else is keeping the script from renaming the folder? And the reason I ask is so I can put everything I need in a script and have it run without user or I. I don't want to have to go touch hundreds of boxes one by one.

This topic has been locked by an administrator and is no longer open for commenting. That said, you should still take some precautions before deleting this folder. You must ensure that the root cause of the errors on your PC is Windows Update.

So, when the update files are ready, your operating system will recreate the folder. Whenever you decide to make changes to your system, it is essential that you create a restore point.

This way, if anything goes wrong, you can always bring back your OS to a working state. So, follow the steps below:. Let your system create a restore point. It may take a couple of minutes for the process to complete. After creating a restore point, you can now delete the SoftwareDistribution folder. To do that, you need to follow the instructions below:.

Note: You can also use an elevated form of Command Prompt for this method. Right-click Command Prompt from the results, then select Run as Administrator. When this happens, all you need to do is restart your computer. Some users are worried about removing the SoftwareDistribution folder. After all, it is an essential part of Windows Update. If you share the same sentiment, then we suggest that you can rename the folder. Here are the steps:. This freed up a lot of space and did not cause any issues.

If you have applied all the updates that Windows has downloaded you can safely delete the contents of the downloads folder as you have done already. It should clean up after itself but often doesn't. If you happen to delete something that hasn't been installed it'll just download it again. Red Flag This Post Please let us know here why this post is inappropriate.

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