Don't think you'll need to uninstall Vista SP1? Want to recover up to a gig of drive space? Then check out the Vista SP1 File Removal Tool.

NicolBlog - "Window Vista SP1 File Removal Tool" AKA "how to recover disk space after Vista SP1 installation"

"as described below you can use vsp1cln.exe to remove SP1 uninstallation information and recover up to 1Gb of disk space...

Windows Vista SP1 File Removal tool (Vsp1cln.exe). Vsp1cln.exe is an optional tool that you can run after you install SP1. This tool removes older versions of components that have been updated in SP1, which are stored during the installation in case you need to uninstall SP1 later. Saving these older components increases the amount of disk space that is used. Typically, you should run Vsp1cln.exe if you want to reclaim this disk space after applying SP1 and if you will not need to uninstall SP1. Note, however, that you cannot uninstall SP1 after you run this tool. You can use this tool both online and offline, but you must have SP1 installed and you must use the correct version of the tool. If you are running this file on an offline image, you should use the Vsp1cln.exe included in the Windows OPK or AIK. However, if you are running this file online (on a computer that you are booted into), you should use the Vsp1cln.exe file located at %windir%\system32\vsp1cln.exe.

More info: http://technet2.microsoft.com/WindowsVista/en/library/5cf710a1-1414-4d11-97de-
0748abdcec651033.mspx?mfr=true

" [Post leached in full]

C:\Windows\system32>vsp1cln
This operation will make  Windows Vista Service Pack 1 permanent on this computer.
Upon completion you will not be able to remove Windows Vista Service Pack 1 from
this system.

Would you like to continue? (Y/N):

Just to be safe, I'm going to do a Complete PC backup before executing this. But I've been running SP1 for a while now and havn't had any issues with it, so I'm okay losing the uninstall capability to recover the drive space.

I'll let you know if I have any problems...

 

Update #1 3/20/2008 @ 9:00am PDT:

• Backup done (man I love Vista's Complete PC backup feature).
• VSP1CLN executed (via Run As Administrator CMD prompt)
• Took about 5-10 minutes (wasn't watching, but didn't seem to take all the long).

Results:

Before

Directory of c:\
...
9 Dir(s)  52,995,837,952 bytes free

After

9 Dir(s)  53,919,440,896 bytes free