Be Careful with Cleaning Windows Files

I have installed MS Office XP in my laptop. Because of lack of HD capacity, I searched for some files which are larger than 10MB. There is a 56MB file "1e16a6.msp" in C:\Windows\installer, and I got rid of it. However, when I am going to reconfig or uninstall MS office XP, there is a warning sign, and the uninstall process stopped. I was confused with that.

How can I uninstall this product from my computer? After I have checked the uninstall log file, I found there are some hints in the log. The reason is that the uninstall program relies on the file "1e16a6.msp" in C:\Windows\installer or some temporary files in the temp directory. Then I had to find a "1e16a6.msp" in the package files of MS Office. Microsoft knowledge base tells us there is a way using "windows install" v3.1 to extract a file from the package. After extracting the file to the C:\Windows\installer, the uninstall program works again.

Windows does not have a clear package manager, so we don't know where the files will be installed. Cleaning disk is complex job; once you make a mistake, it maybe crash the program and even damage the system.

Linux distributions have good package managers such as rpm and deb, so the users can easily know which file is provided by what package, and what's the function by the package . With these efficient tools, deploying the systems is just a breeze.