blog: Q: how big is winsxs folder?

[Kilmatead]

Ah, RSS feeds are alive and well around here, I see.

When I was getting my degree in Forensic Reparse Pointology hard-links were always mentioned by articles on the periphery, but none went into such detail. Since the well known Link Shell Extension provides nice hard-link support, I decided it was much easier to just leave them as "above my pay-grade", since they have wholly different headers. They're easy enough to enumerate via the API, as I recall... but the other stuff... yuck...

[RightPaddock]

I've been using disk cleanup since I installed Win 7, now use it on Win 10 - never had any problem with, or because of it. That DISM stuff in prior versions was too hard for me.

The FileMenuTools' Folder Size feature offers the choice of discounting the hardlinks. It takes longer to do the sums if you do that of course. Many filesin winsxs are also given a run in syswow64 and/or system32. in Win7 notepad.exe had a Links count of 4, on Win 10 its down to 2. On Win 10, FMT->FolderSize (with hardlink discounting) reports Windows directory is 19.13GB, File Explorer->Properties reports 24.9. My Top 10 folders after discounting are shown below

Hardlink is a stupid word, IMO it should be something like multilink.

RP