How big is your one?

Check your system folder:

C:\Windows\winsxs

Mine is 16GB (on a 140GB drive)

Have googled extensively in the past day or so, and have had little success in dealing with it. Who's got the answer? You'll be an international genius if you do.

5.87 GB on (1TB Drive)

Google's top answer explains it http://www.winvistaclub.com/f16.html

Edited by deleted (Tue 01-Mar-11 04:02:00)

I understand that 'in theory' the space isn't being taken up, but Windows, DOS, Treesize, and a few other programs (defrag!!) see the space as used.

Now if all those programs which see that space as used, then it is logical to assume that if you fill your drive to capacity, it will return "out of space" messages. Whether or not it's really being used, Windows sees it as such, so it might as well be.

10.6gig on 500gig

Who cares? Buy a bigger disk. Disk space is cheaper than worrying about the size of that folder.

Same here on a 98GB partition of a 500GB drive

In reply to a post by NeMs:

5.87 GB on (1TB Drive)

Google's top answer explains it http://www.winvistaclub.com/f16.html

No it isn't.

Not only will I have to buy (spend vs tweak), but I'll have to reinstall, when I have a pretty good setup otherwise. That's playing into the hands of MS. They don't want their OSs being reinstalled if they can avoid it. They would rather people upgraded (spent money). The hardware folk don't mind either.

Believe it or not I actually enjoy learning about what makes the thing tick, and since my two year old system is as heavily loaded as ever before, but is faster than ever, I reckon there's little point in upgrading.

£200+ for a worthwhile replacement (and all the tweaks to be done again) vs no layout and a faster system today...no contest.

Seriously cam, you should ditch Vista and move to 7. It's only £70 if you insist on buying it.

and then he can do it all over again

For comparison, on an XP system that was a fresh install 5 years ago - 78.6 MB