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| Thread ID: 106736 | 2010-01-21 05:55:00 | what is C:\windows\winsxs for, and why is it taking up 10gb on my hard drive? | nedkelly (9059) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 850468 | 2010-01-21 05:55:00 | Hey was looking through my hard drive today with windirstat and saw my windows folder was taking up 21gb and saw winsxs taking up 10gb of space. And was wondering what is it for? | nedkelly (9059) | ||
| 850469 | 2010-01-21 05:58:00 | It's the equivalent of XP's i386 folder described here (www.winvistaclub.com) | gary67 (56) | ||
| 850470 | 2010-01-21 06:14:00 | It doesn't really take up that much space. It's just a bunch of hard links to files, there's a good explanation here (this article is also mentioned in gary67's link): blogs.msdn.com cheers W |
waldok (15185) | ||
| 850471 | 2010-01-21 06:16:00 | it is essentially a "flat" copy of your Windows installation which means that its all of the files needed for you to use Windows without the need to put a CD\DVD into the drive every time that you need to add a new feature or update a file. blogs.technet.com Where did you see the 10GB value from? If you are looking at this inside Explorer it is not exactly accurate because that WinSXS folder contains hard links, sym links and junction points (!) |
nmercer (3899) | ||
| 850472 | 2010-01-21 06:22:00 | Right clicking/ Properties shows mine as 4.08GB | wainuitech (129) | ||
| 850473 | 2010-01-21 06:26:00 | Mines 5.8GB | gary67 (56) | ||
| 850474 | 2010-01-21 06:27:00 | Yeah weird eh ... :) Mine says 5.89GB, but from the E7 blog article I linked to: But in reality it doesn’t actually consume as much disk space as it appears when using the built-in tools (DIR and Explorer) to measure disk space used. The fact that we make it tricky for you to know how much space is actually consumed in a directory is definitely a fair point! In practice, nearly every file in the WinSxS directory is a “hard link” to the physical files elsewhere on the system—meaning that the files are not actually in this directory. For instance in the WinSxS there might be a file called advapi32.dll that takes up >700K however what’s being reported is a hard link to the actual file that lives in the Windows\System32, and it will be counted twice (or more) when simply looking at the individual directories from Windows Explorer. cheers W |
waldok (15185) | ||
| 850475 | 2010-01-28 10:20:00 | so now the question is .... how does the o/s accurately compute free disc space for installs, and for "properties" under My Computer ? My winsxs folder is 27 gigs, and I was "advised" by Microsux to "buy a bigger hard drive" ... not a cheap option on this HP ... This winsxs bloat has no upper limit, BTW. Is this really the best way to design an o/s ? | hbalfour (15581) | ||
| 850476 | 2010-01-28 19:05:00 | so now the question is ... . how does the o/s accurately compute free disc space for installs, and for "properties" under My Computer ? My winsxs folder is 27 gigs, and I was "advised" by Microsux to "buy a bigger hard drive" ... not a cheap option on this HP ... This winsxs bloat has no upper limit, BTW. Is this really the best way to design an o/s ? Have a read of the article that Gary posted in # 2 that explains it very well. The more programs you install / uninstall teh larger the winsxs folder gets. Is it a good idea -- Well kind of, ever notice PC's from Dell, HP dont ask for the windows CD/DVD if needing standard components, that's because the i386 folder is there. Windows 98 used to be a classic asking all the time - in W98 I usually copy the i386 folder over to the HDD, never needs to ask for the CD then, and the OS also gets installed from that folder in the beginning through a bootable floppy and DOS, no CD required. |
wainuitech (129) | ||
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