Ask HN: Does anyone what a "RiotCache.dat" file was doing in my EFI partition?
The article discusses the presence of a 'RiotCache.dat' file in the EFI partition, which is associated with Vanguard, a system driver used by Riot Games. Vanguard operates at a low level within the Windows kernel and utilizes the UEFI service partition for file storage. Users who no longer play Riot's games and have deactivated Vanguard can safely remove this file.
- ▪The 'RiotCache.dat' file is part of Vanguard, a system driver for Riot Games.
- ▪Vanguard hooks into the Windows kernel and uses the UEFI service partition for file storage.
- ▪Users can safely remove the file if they no longer play Riot's games and have deactivated Vanguard.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Ycombinator |
| Canonical URL | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48248915 |
| Publication time | Sat, 23 May 2026 16:19:09 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-23T16:37:27.528Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-23T16:37:31.488Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | VSbAV72FztDv |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
It's part of Vanguard. As Vanguard hooks itself into the Windows kernel through a low level (ring 0) system driver and all partitions except the system / UEFI service partition are not available at boot/init time (which is the moment Vanguard is loaded and activated) it uses the UEFI service partition to dump files it temporarily or permanently requires.If you no longer play any of Riot's games (which you should if you really care about the integrity of your system) and Vanguard is no longer active on your system you should be able to safely remove it.
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.