windows 7 Weird files in C drive

[Dreamer758]

Hi im new to windows This is a fresh install after finially getting everything up and running i noticed these weird files in the c drive. They dont look like they should be there and they weren't there before can i delete them why do they have locks. Could it be because i used this app to fix windows garbage updater its called wsusoffline im making windows my primary OS and ditching mac os 

[Doughmay]

Your C drive looks pretty normal to me. I don't see a problem. I think you should be OK.  

[KenjiUmino]

interesting question. sadly, i don't have the answer but i would like to know too because i have seen these before.

 

on my system, they did not show up on C but on other drives

 

i have my pictures, music, videos and document folder paths mapped to a differend drive so that could be the reason why they show up on that drive instead of C

[flibberdipper]

Those are just stuff that gets left over from updates or Office installs (and I think? Visual Studio and then the redistrubutable crap by a similar name).

[vaiwalker]

according to 'Tabris DarkPeace' http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1752853/folders-long-random-words-letters.html

 

They are the MD5 and/or SHA1 of the Windows Updates.
- This makes look-up faster and far more reliable as two different patches with the same name will not have the same hash/HMAC values.
- https://www.google.com.au/search?q=md5+sha1

If they are over 72 hours old, and you have restarted since they can be safely deleted.
The Disk Clean-up Wizard generally ignores these folders.


32 hexadecimal characters (numbers, including A-F) gives 2^128 values; which is quite a lot.

Windows Updates stores files in a certain place, they then usually get extracted to the volume with the most free space prior to installation.

These folders are not made by Steam.