Reducing Bandwidth usage by tracing Temporary Installation Folder

There are many applications like Browsers & Instant Messengers which we keep installing across multiple PC's. Companies like Yahoo, Microsoft & many others have adopted a strange strategy from past few years wherein they provide Installers which require Internet connection while the installation is in progress. Thats because the Installers that we download from their web sites are just shortcuts to the complete list of files actually required for the installation. The files are stored on their Servers, which get downloaded each & every time we initiate such an installation. We can call them ONLINE installers & not the OFFLINE installers which were quite prevalent few years back. Though there might not have been any version change when you moved from one PC to another, but since these are Online installers, the installation requires repeated download of files onto the Application specific Temporary Installation Folder during the installation. Excluding some cases, most of them get stored in deep nested folders inside your Hard Disk making it difficult to a regular user to track such folders. This results in unnecessary Bandwidth usage for repeated tasks, something which can be reduced using your Brains.

How do we do that? Its simple. Whenever an installer is executed just run your Anti-Virus application & track the files that are currently being scanned by your Anti-Virus application's Real-time Scanning module, & this is where the trick lies. A screen-shot from Avast Anti-Virus is shown below.



After observing the scanning for a couple of minutes you would soon be able to track the Temporary Installation Folder for that application. This requires you to be a little bit tech savvy. For example, while the Yahoo Messenger installer is executed, just goto Start -> Run -> %TEMP% . You would now be taken to the Temporary folder for your User Profile, where you would be able to find a folder which Yahoo Messenger has created & also downloaded an Offline Installer for Yahoo Messenger. Similarly while installation Internet Explorer 7.0 or Internet Explorer 8.0 - Beta you would find a folder named ie7 or ie8 created under your :\Windows folder. Just copy the ie7 or ie8 folder to a different location once the Installer status shows "Downloading Files" as completed. Now create a separate Offline installation folder for Internet Explorer where you store the ie7 / ie8 folder along with the Online Installer setup that you had downloaded from Microsoft's site. In future whenever you want to install Internet Explorer, just copy the ie7 / ie8 folder in
:\Windows before executing the Online installer. You would soon realize that the Online installer completes the installation process faster, as a fresh download of installation files is not required.

Try this trick yourself & save on precious Bandwidth.

No comments: