I'm shocked that this hasn't been asked yet - but I can't install VS 2008 sp1 because my c: (%SYSTEMDRIVE%) has around 1.6 G free...
How in the world can I get sp1 to install?
Thanks
UPDATE: I had the C++ bits installed - and I wasn't using them... Once I removed the C++ bits the installer stopped complaining.
ALSO - FYI - my %tmp% and %temp% already pointed to a different disk - but the installer isn't smart enough to figure that out i guess...
You're going to need more hard drive space. The VS installer will be doing a lot of downloading, uncompressing, and copying. So most of the 4gb is used for swap space, not necessarily for final installation.
I've had similar problems with other installations. Re-setting TMP and/or TEMP to a partition with more space seems to have worked.
Per the system requirements from the release notes from Visual Studio 2008 SP1: "3.8 GB available on the system drive, plus 600 MB on the drive on which Visual Studio is installed. Note: You can use the Disk Cleanup utility to remove temporary files." One option that could help you is to turn off system restore, restart, install, then turn system restore back on. Risky, but it may allow the install if you are absolutely desperate.
It's also possible to turn of the swap space of Windows. Only do that when you've got plenty of RAM. Swap space can be found in My Computer/properties/Advanced/Performance/Advanced/Virtual Memory.
If you also wish to defrag at some point, do it when the disk is as empty as possible otherwise defrag (which can improve performance) will not work all that well, if at all.
Don't forget to activate swap space again afterwards.
sadly i had to remove c++ ( see my update in the question ) and that 'fixed' it...