In reply to a post by Pipexer:

Again without meaning to be cheeky you clearly have a strange obsession with this folder!

Not at all, but I'll not let folk fleece me about it, or convince me to upgrade at my coast to avoid it (which I won't anyway).

Mine is 13.8GB on a 320GB drive.

As Pipexer did, I took advantage of the £25 upgrade to Windows 8 (twice), just as I took advantage of the cheap upgrade to Windows 7. But even if you pay a full £100 because you weren't on the ball, is £25 a year a huge price to pay to make your computer run as efficiently as possible?

If you are happy with Windows 7 (or even with XP) then stick with it; but there seems to be little point in doing so and then complaining about the amount of space that a particular folder takes when that is so easily cured. Even if it took 50GB (and, as has already been explained, this is just an illusion) it really wouldn't bother me. That's just a fraction of the free disk space on my Windows machines. If I need more, hard disks are cheap.

In reply to a post by AEP:

If you are happy with Windows 7 (or even with XP) then stick with it; but there seems to be little point in doing so and then complaining about the amount of space that a particular folder takes when that is so easily cured. Even if it took 50GB (and, as has already been explained, this is just an illusion) it really wouldn't bother me. That's just a fraction of the free disk space on my Windows machines. If I need more, hard disks are cheap.

If 7 or 8 had a massive advantage over what I have (to what I do), then I would. I'm happy with Vista. Have been since I started tweaking it. It's pretty stable, and fast for me. I'm led to believe that 7 won't be much of change, and 8 won't have masses of advantage either.

My last OS was XP, but I had a bad setup. Had it been good, I would have skipped Vista and jumped to 7 most likely. As it is, I'll probably keep this one until things get bad. I don't like to cop and change OS installation unless there's a problem, and I prefer to get a new OS when I get a new system.

+50% growth in winsxs folder size is astronomical if you didn't have it planned in your SSD or partition or VM that was sized according to the MS System Requirements.

I don't like to cop and change OS installation unless there's a problem

So the winsx stuff is just an annoyance, not a problem? That's fair enough - I don't know any software that doesn't have the slight annoyance.

I agree with you; stick with whatever works for you. And I agree with Pipexer; if it doesn't work then upgrade.

It would be astronomical, perhaps, if it represented real growth. But as it is illusory, just very small hard links, what does it matter?

In reply to a post by AEP:

It would be astronomical, perhaps, if it represented real growth. But as it is illusory, just very small hard links, what does it matter?

That seems to be a common response from MS, but it isn't small hard links or illusory, according to the Windows Server Core Team who say

The WinSxS folder is the only location that the component is found on the system, all other instances of the files that you see on the system are �projected� by hard linking from the component store. Let me repeat that last point � there is only one instance (or full data copy) of each version of each file in the OS, and that instance is located in the WinSxS folder.

Edit to add stats from a laptop showing with and without hardlinked files :--

C:\Users\Newuser\Downloads>du -u c:\windows\winsxs

Du v1.5 - report directory disk usage
Copyright (C) 2005-2013 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

Files: 53403
Directories: 12316
Size: 12,681,596,028 bytes
Size on disk: 12,859,895,808 bytes


C:\Users\Newuser\Downloads>du c:\windows\winsxs

Du v1.5 - report directory disk usage
Copyright (C) 2005-2013 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com

Files: 50642
Directories: 12316
Size: 12,071,577,195 bytes
Size on disk: 12,243,546,112 bytes

Edited by yarwell (Mon 08-Apr-13 10:39:43)

You think it matters which way the hard links go? With or without the winsxs folder the files would still be on the hard disk.

In reply to a post by AEP:

You think it matters which way the hard links go? With or without the winsxs folder the files would still be on the hard disk.

No, obviously, but its better for people to state the truth and not make rubbish up to deflect.

The issue remains why there is so much stuff in there that the system requirements for the OS are exceeded. I don't need a Korean grammar checker, etc etc