Back in the beginning of last year I ran a piece on how to free up disk space by removing older versions of the Chrome web browser. I started to investigate the issue after installing a Solid State Drive on my computer and noticing that it filled up rather quickly with auto-generated data. Turned out that Chrome was keeping old versions of the browser available in the Chrome directory. And while some users reported that only the last but one version was kept by Google Updater, multiple versions were kept by my Chrome installation.
This all in all turned out to waste more than 2 Gigabytes of space on my previous SSD which I could not use for other tasks instead.
Having to open the directory manually regularly is without doubt not the best way of handling the issue. Since Chrome is updating fairly regularly, you might have to check every month or so to delete unneeded versions of the browser from your hard drive.
Old Chrome Remover is a free program for the Windows operating system that can remove old versions of the Google Browser automatically from the system. It will automatically check for Chrome installations on the system when run and display all old version in a window afterwards.
The application supports not only Chrome Stable installations but also other Chrome installations including cutting edge Canary builds. Please note that it will display and offer to delete all old versions from the hard drive, with no option to manually select the versions you want deleted.
You need to press the Y key on the keyword to have the program delete all outdated Chrome installations on the system. If you do not want that you can press any other key to leave everything as is. You need to close all instances of the Chrome browser prior to deleting the old Chrome folders on the system. You will receive an access denied error message otherwise. The program needs to be run with elevated privileges under Vista and Windows 7.
Note that you should not run the tool if you have multiple Chrome channels installed on your system, as it will delete ALL old instances which means that you will end up with only one working version of Chrome (this happened on my system where I was running Dev and Canary builds of the browser. After running the tool, only the Canary build was still available, while the Dev build was not).
Old Chrome Remover is therefor only an option if you are running one version of Chrome on your system. Advanced users can use the /AUTO parameter to run the program silently.
Interested users can download Old Chrome Remover from Shane Gowlands website. Please note that the program requires the Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5 to work. (via JKWebTalks)
© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2012. | Permalink |
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Post tags: google chrome, windows software
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