Cleaning windows - logs

Generally you can delete them after a successful hardware or software installation but they are littered all over the place. Puran Utilities is good for finding lots of them but it doesn't find these in C:\Windows\inf.

Here we're going to look at these on three notebooks all running windows 7 Home Premium.
This is a screenshot from Red.

Blue shows the last two files at 14,158,258 & 952,217  which is nuts as there's nothing much on it. What is even nutser is that Black only has setupapi.app.log and it's 159 bytes.

There is an interesting article at https://support.microsoft.com/en-ph/help/958909/it-takes-a-long-time-to-log-on-to-a-windows-vista-based-computer-that which states that anything over 5Mb is very large and suggests that the reason is verbose reporting and mainly caused by anti-virus software continually opening and closing the log file.

Well I dunno about that but changing the value of
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup\LogLevel

certainly has an effect, to whit:

The verbosity of the log report is set by that registry key, in the old days it was 20000FFFF, the article above suggests using 20. I have no idea how Black ended up with 101 but it works and boots in 45s so it's staying as it is.

Blue now boots in 2¼  minutes rather than 15 or so and is usable again. Same spec as Black, a pretty basic AMD C-60, 1000 MHz, 4Gb RAM.

Red's much the same as before, it's an old i7 but still pretty quick.

If you're not comfortable with editing the registry then don't; the adventurous might like to rename 

setupapi.app.log & setupapi.dev.log 

to

setupapi.app.logOLD & setupapi.dev.logOLD

reboot and see what happens.

The file size reductions above are after the first reboot, whether they grow remains to be seen.

All machines are using AVG Anti-virus, the free version.
Stop press: changing the Blue verbosity to 101 reduces startup to 2 minutes and the log file is now 10,831

I don't know why setupapi.app.20170521_151423.log and setupapi.dev.20150729_121527.log are in blue. They seem to be snapshots from the past but they're gone and not missed.

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Puran Utilities  - I'm using v 3.0.0.0 from 2013, the latest version may do a bit more. If you install it check the folder for oddities. I've just noticed this massive Temp file

now that's gone too.

Digging a bit deeper, there's a file called AppList which works with Delete History

So that can be edited to add stuff or hide what you never use. Clever or what?

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Happy Cleaning