blog: Q: how big is winsxs folder?

[nikos]

A: very big
http://zabkat.com/blog/how-big-is-winsxs.htm

[Tuxman]

Still you can clean it up.

[nikos]

that's interesting; have you tried it? microsoft often "recall" such tools after they prove to destabilize some windows installations

[Tuxman]

Well, I don't have Windows Server. Not sure if I should try if Windows 7 does it too.
(I remember having used a "recalled" Microsoft boot optimizer which basically filled my hard disk with log files.)

edit:
Oh, it does.

[nikos]

I will let somebody else try it
however I'd like to find a similar one for windows vista because i have a virtual machine that needs all the disk space it can get. Googling for it shows only stuff for windows 7 and 8

[Tuxman]

I just tried it on my Win7 machine. Seems to work, although it's less than 3 GiB that's displayed.

[FrizzleFry]

WinSxS uses a little over 9 GB on my PC... that almost half of the Windows directory...

after installing the update Disk Cleanup offers to delete 1.2 GB of Windows Update stuff...
cleanup finished without any problems...

[nikos]

ok, thanks tuxman, i'll change the blog article to add your good find! sadly it looks there's nothing like it for vista. I could try the solution for server 2008 that supposedly has the vista core

btw if there are any problems after the cleanup, you won't find them immediately but only during one future update where things will break unexpectedly...

[pj]

Sorry if I'm missing something, but is saving a fraction of a percent of a modern hard drive (500GB and larger) worth all this effort and potential failures? Could all that effort be better spent ghosting your Windows partition to a larger replacement drive and moving your data (you DO have separate partitions for the OS and data, right?) to a larger partition on the new drive? Instead of getting 2-5 GB more, you might end up with 100's of new GB's to fill.

Sorry, I just don't get the point of the whole subject for this blog. Windows is bloated by design, so why try to change the design?

-------------------------------
PJ in (getting HOTTER) FL

[Tuxman]

Windows is "bloated"? Not compared to hyped oh-so-modern systems as Dumbuntu.

That said, the fact that you have a giant hard drive is not a reason to waste bytes on it.

[Kilmatead]

Considering that modern games easily install to 20-30GB's, and I have transcoded blue-ray films which are MKV files larger than your whole Winsxs folder, I too see little point in worrying about it. (Then again, if you're actually worried - in an "oh my god, I left the cooker turned on" sense - about how much space [in bytes] a hard-link takes up, I would suggest you seek help for your OCD difficulties post-haste.)

That said, there is no "risk" associated with this - I've been doing it on Win7 x64 for the last year without any trouble at all (as long as you don't want to uninstall any "old" updates - but considering I only ever "uninstalled" an update once in my life, this is not a pressing concern).

This functionality was automatically added to Win7 when (I think) VS2008 was installed and received its usual round of automatic updates, so I never had to download anything specifically. It just kicks-in as part of the regular disc-cleanup task. The only strange part is when you reboot Windows the first time (after cleaning), it goes into its "configuring updates" mode for a giggle (when you know there weren't any installed that day, which leads to a momentary confusion) - but it's essentially harmless.

[FrizzleFry]

I noticed that...

I was curious about what the update to disk cleanup would do more than anything else...

I don't use the system partition for anything else so that space is "wasted" anyway... plus I tend to restore one of my system images every few months...

[nikos]

this headache of an article explains how hard links are stored at the low level

[Kilmatead]

Why is this idea resurrected elsewhere too this week? Did someone fall down a water-well again? It appears Win8.1 has some newfangled DISM switch if you want a log...

[nikos]

because i found that information in the old new thing article you mentioned