8 ms·

50-100MB seems like a miniscule amount of space to warrant something like this. My WinSxS folder alone is almost 10GB. If they wanted to save space, even a mo

50-100MB seems like a miniscule amount of space to warrant something like this. My WinSxS folder alone is almost 10GB. If they wanted to save space, even a modest improvement in managing updates would yield space saving results orders of magnitude greater than this.

close04 7y ago
Between the traditional Disk Cleanup and a quick DISM cleanup (which should already be running as a scheduled task) you can get pretty good results on any Windows 8.1/2012R2 and above: Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase
- yebyen 7y ago
  > quick DISM cleanup (which should already be running as a scheduled task) Is this a recommendation/suggestion of yours, or a default state?
  - smitty1110 7y ago
    Last I knew you had to set it up yourself.
- theandrewbailey 7y ago
  More info on what that does: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/clean-up-the-winsxs-folder https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur...
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    I don't really see the need to have the ability to uninstall service packs... Especially not if it's wasting 25% of the space on my tiny SSD! The original windows installation media could be used to restore the system if something went horribly wrong anyway. Why the need to keep every previously used version of every dll?
    - arpa 7y ago
      Because Microsoft. We will lie to you about making registry backups successfully to save a few megs of space, bud god forbid we touch the winsxs elephant in the room.
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      Because Windows doesn't always have access to the installation media, even when it is a partition on the same drive? There was an Insider blog post somewhat recently about Windows 10 trying to repack things into installation media over time, when it's a recovery image on the local machine. It sounds like they are working to better the situation.
- jamklda 7y ago
  I'm using Dism++ (GUI) for this job https://www.chuyu.me/en/index.html https://www.chuyu.me/en/index.html
  - chris_wot 7y ago
    Is this open sourced?
    - geegoo 7y ago
      Only the parts that they took from other reverse engineered header projects are opensource (because they have to). They answered on one of their Github issues that the actual core code is not open source. I wouldn't touch this.
  - close04 7y ago
    These are some pretty privileged operations you're trusting the tool to perform. I'm not sure a couple of commands warrant using a GUI tool, especially one that doesn't seem to inspire too much confidence upon cursory examination. https://github.com/Chuyu-Team/Dism-Multi-language/blob/master/UpdateHistory.md https://github.com/Chuyu-Team/Dism-Multi-language/blob/maste...
folkhack 7y ago
Agree on the 50-100MB being minuscule. I don't even provision a Windows VM without 60G worth of space due to how bad it is on cleaning itself up/bloat. I wasn't even able to install Windows 7 a few months ago due to the WinSxS folder continuously bloating to fill the disk (stock on a T440p - super weird issues). It's almost as if they broke new-install update cycles on Win7 on purpose =/ My question is why the hell would they turn off a feature like this in the first place?! What is the actual "money making" motivation behind the decision?
- nightski 7y ago
  That sounds like something was seriously wrong with your install. I am on a desktop running windows 10 since its release on which I use daily and install a lot of software - and the windows folder is sitting at 12 GB.
  - rstuart4133 7y ago
    > the windows folder is sitting at 12 GB I don't think the Windows folder is a particular good indication of Windows space usage. A while ago Microsoft put a tablet killer design out there: 11 Screen, 4GB RAM, Touch Screen and 32GB SSD. Man+dog shipped them. Then man+dog found the machines died because Windows ran out of disk space on patch Tuesday. So regardless of what is in the windows directory 32GB is not enough to run Windows. We "fixed" the problem by replacing Windows with Linux. Total size of Linux install, which included Libre Office and a selection of browsers: less than 4GB. Microsoft attempting to fix the size issue by removing 100M of backups when the scale of the problem they are trying to solve is 4GB vs 32GB is a almost laughable.
    - gambiting 7y ago
      As an owner of one of these early tablets(quad core atom, 1GB ram, 32GB SSD) I can confirm that you cannot install updates anymore after a while, even when there's a few GB left, the system just refuses to proceed.
    - pjmlp 7y ago
fencepost 7y ago
Note that part of the size of WinSxS is an illusion because basically everything there is hard linked from elsewhere on the system (yes, NTFS supports hard links). There are some ways to do limited cleanup on it, but it's not a place to poke around in manually. More depth: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/winsxs-folder-windows-7-8 https://www.thewindowsclub.com/winsxs-folder-windows-7-8
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  I Have found via experimentation and freespace monitoring that most of the size of the winsxs folder that explorer shows when you look at properties, is infact eaten off the drive. Its a royal pain in the ass for 120GB ssd installs or smaller.
ushg 7y ago
I wonder if it's related to the trend in recent years of manufacturers marketing ultra low-budget Windows 10 laptops (and to a lesser extent tablets) with critically small amounts of non-upgradeable storage? An install of Windows 10 typically takes up ~26GB and there's already a problem with consumers discovering that their 32GB soldered eMMC machines are unable to perform any OS updates without jumping through extra hoops with external storage [0]. [0] https://www.dell.com/support/article/ie/en/iedhs1/sln310147/windows-10-needs-more-space-for-update-on-32gb-storage-devices?lang=en https://www.dell.com/support/article/ie/en/iedhs1/sln310147/...
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  Those machines are already mostly unusable under Windows because MS only requires 2GiB minimum so it's an instant swapfest to eMMC. Put Linux on them and they're quite nice.
  - gambiting 7y ago
    I disagree - I have one with a quad core atom, 1GB of ram(!!!) And latest windows 10 1903 edition runs very nicely on it if you stick to the built-in apps. I usually have it next to my main PC as an additional monitor with the wireless projector functionality .
    - 0815test 7y ago
      I'll hazard a guess that your Win10 machine on 1GB RAM is swapping plenty. A lightweight Linux distribution can run a reasonable desktop workload (including some web browsing!) on 1GB with zilch swap use, or on as little as 512MB with tolerable use of swap. It's a bit disappointing in a way, but Linux (and not even every Linux distro, for that matter) is the only OS where I can visibly tell that I'm running something reasonably bloat-free, and it makes the UX incredibly snappy and comfortable all-around.
      - StillBored 7y ago
        Well, i'm here to say that if you use a normal linux distro with KDE or Gnome your going to be in the multiple GB's of ram pretty quick. Sure you can have a stripped down linux distro with X/lxde or whatever in under 1GB, but you can also use windows IoT or Core for much the same effect. The problem is that MS (and the mainstream linux DE's) aren't willing to admit that some of the "modernization" they have done over the last decade has done nothing but increase the visual lag while massively increasing the resource consumption for what is frequently little more than transparent windows (cause high DPI is still not quite there in both cases...).
philjohn 7y ago
Marginal gains. 50MB here, 100MB there ... pretty soon you're talking real storage usage.
- hirsin 7y ago
  Pretty much this. I once tried adding a new ~3 MB binary, and it was rejected on effectively these grounds. Now consider that the team making these in/out decisions has a backlog of requests just like it for larger items...
  - pas 7y ago
    Is there a team that can exterminate other teams in very medieval ways that fail to make stuff installable to non system drive? Because there should be. It's crazy that everything still wants to put stuff on C:\ ... I'm looking at you Visual Studio and Win SDK. Plus Users\Public shared goodies. And the %userprofile%\AppData. I get that every application thinks it needs to put its cache/files there, but then why can't folks relocate users' homes? :/
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      > Is there a team that can exterminate other teams in very medieval ways that fail to make stuff installable to non system drive? I'd love if that team would also take a look at Android, where you simply can't not install on the "system drive" aka. main phone flash.
      - hirsin 7y ago
        That was a design decision made because install to SD card causes apps to load slowly (to my understanding). It used to be possible but they killed it. Doesn't hurt that it helps speed up the upgrade cycle since users run out of on-board space sooner.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  Some 10 of those and it makes some difference on a phone... In how many places does Windows concentrate the settings for everything?
blablabla123 7y ago
Yes but isolated registry backups make as much sense as a full backup of a modern Linux Desktop's /etc folder. Probably not much. The config's content depends a lot on the things installed and vice-versa, even more so on Windows (unless they changed something fundamentally since 7). At least on Linux and in particular Ubuntu (Desktop) installations I aim for as little manual configuration changes as possible anyways, so updates don't break things...
- outworlder 7y ago
  If you backup etc and home, you can pretty much restore a linux machine back to working order. Yes, you might be missing packages in a brand new install, but then the extra files are harmless. People put etc in git even: https://joeyh.name/code/etckeeper/ https://joeyh.name/code/etckeeper/ The registry is much more magical and it is difficult to find and remove cruft, so I suppose there's an argument against it.
  - la_barba 7y ago
    >If you backup etc and home, you can pretty much restore a linux machine back to working order. Hmm, I've never done this. In terms of config files, are there never any breaking changes between versions? Like ..is a v1.0 config file always guaranteed to work with v2.0 and vice versa? I guess and a related question - what is the best way to determine if an /etc/ config file isn't required?
    - velosol 7y ago
      Usually breaking changes are highlighted in your update cycle and if something is added or slightly modified you might find a *.conf.rpmnew or similar. rpmconf [1] helps with those sorts of updates. [1]: https://github.com/xsuchy/rpmconf https://github.com/xsuchy/rpmconf
    - rincebrain 7y ago
      Stuff can break - there's not especially strong guarantees across versions, but if I, say, took /etc and /home from a Debian stretch system and put them on another Debian system, it would likely mostly Just Work. It gets more exciting the further you drift - e.g. if you're going to Debian buster, or something more significantly different like Fedora/RH, you'd probably want to cherrypick config changes from /etc, though /home should be fine(tm).
agumonkey 7y ago
Of all the stuff crammed automatically on Windows 10 install .. they can't be serious about saving space. I had to powershell candycrush off the drive for god's sake.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  The candycrush install trigger is annoying but mere KB, it's not disk space bloat.
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    I'm not sure it's always the case. They were accounted for hundreds of MB. Removing them (many games) increased free space.
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      Looking into it further, apparently windows keeps a secret cache even after you uninstall those apps, so powershell is necessary not just to remove the install trigger but to remove that extra copy. Thanks, windows.

close04 7y ago

Between the traditional Disk Cleanup and a quick DISM cleanup (which should already be running as a scheduled task) you can get pretty good results on any Windows 8.1/2012R2 and above: Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase

yebyen 7y ago
> quick DISM cleanup (which should already be running as a scheduled task) Is this a recommendation/suggestion of yours, or a default state?
- smitty1110 7y ago
  Last I knew you had to set it up yourself.
theandrewbailey 7y ago
More info on what that does: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/clean-up-the-winsxs-folder https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur...
- londons_explore 7y ago
  I don't really see the need to have the ability to uninstall service packs... Especially not if it's wasting 25% of the space on my tiny SSD! The original windows installation media could be used to restore the system if something went horribly wrong anyway. Why the need to keep every previously used version of every dll?
  - arpa 7y ago
    Because Microsoft. We will lie to you about making registry backups successfully to save a few megs of space, bud god forbid we touch the winsxs elephant in the room.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    Because Windows doesn't always have access to the installation media, even when it is a partition on the same drive? There was an Insider blog post somewhat recently about Windows 10 trying to repack things into installation media over time, when it's a recovery image on the local machine. It sounds like they are working to better the situation.
jamklda 7y ago
I'm using Dism++ (GUI) for this job https://www.chuyu.me/en/index.html https://www.chuyu.me/en/index.html
- chris_wot 7y ago
  Is this open sourced?
  - geegoo 7y ago
    Only the parts that they took from other reverse engineered header projects are opensource (because they have to). They answered on one of their Github issues that the actual core code is not open source. I wouldn't touch this.
- close04 7y ago
  These are some pretty privileged operations you're trusting the tool to perform. I'm not sure a couple of commands warrant using a GUI tool, especially one that doesn't seem to inspire too much confidence upon cursory examination. https://github.com/Chuyu-Team/Dism-Multi-language/blob/master/UpdateHistory.md https://github.com/Chuyu-Team/Dism-Multi-language/blob/maste...

folkhack 7y ago

Agree on the 50-100MB being minuscule. I don't even provision a Windows VM without 60G worth of space due to how bad it is on cleaning itself up/bloat. I wasn't even able to install Windows 7 a few months ago due to the WinSxS folder continuously bloating to fill the disk (stock on a T440p - super weird issues). It's almost as if they broke new-install update cycles on Win7 on purpose =/ My question is why the hell would they turn off a feature like this in the first place?! What is the actual "money making" motivation behind the decision?

nightski 7y ago
That sounds like something was seriously wrong with your install. I am on a desktop running windows 10 since its release on which I use daily and install a lot of software - and the windows folder is sitting at 12 GB.
- rstuart4133 7y ago
  > the windows folder is sitting at 12 GB I don't think the Windows folder is a particular good indication of Windows space usage. A while ago Microsoft put a tablet killer design out there: 11 Screen, 4GB RAM, Touch Screen and 32GB SSD. Man+dog shipped them. Then man+dog found the machines died because Windows ran out of disk space on patch Tuesday. So regardless of what is in the windows directory 32GB is not enough to run Windows. We "fixed" the problem by replacing Windows with Linux. Total size of Linux install, which included Libre Office and a selection of browsers: less than 4GB. Microsoft attempting to fix the size issue by removing 100M of backups when the scale of the problem they are trying to solve is 4GB vs 32GB is a almost laughable.
  - gambiting 7y ago
    As an owner of one of these early tablets(quad core atom, 1GB ram, 32GB SSD) I can confirm that you cannot install updates anymore after a while, even when there's a few GB left, the system just refuses to proceed.
  - pjmlp 7y ago

fencepost 7y ago

Note that part of the size of WinSxS is an illusion because basically everything there is hard linked from elsewhere on the system (yes, NTFS supports hard links). There are some ways to do limited cleanup on it, but it's not a place to poke around in manually. More depth: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/winsxs-folder-windows-7-8 https://www.thewindowsclub.com/winsxs-folder-windows-7-8

throwaway2048 7y ago
I Have found via experimentation and freespace monitoring that most of the size of the winsxs folder that explorer shows when you look at properties, is infact eaten off the drive. Its a royal pain in the ass for 120GB ssd installs or smaller.

ushg 7y ago

I wonder if it's related to the trend in recent years of manufacturers marketing ultra low-budget Windows 10 laptops (and to a lesser extent tablets) with critically small amounts of non-upgradeable storage? An install of Windows 10 typically takes up ~26GB and there's already a problem with consumers discovering that their 32GB soldered eMMC machines are unable to perform any OS updates without jumping through extra hoops with external storage [0]. [0] https://www.dell.com/support/article/ie/en/iedhs1/sln310147/windows-10-needs-more-space-for-update-on-32gb-storage-devices?lang=en https://www.dell.com/support/article/ie/en/iedhs1/sln310147/...

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
Those machines are already mostly unusable under Windows because MS only requires 2GiB minimum so it's an instant swapfest to eMMC. Put Linux on them and they're quite nice.
- gambiting 7y ago
  I disagree - I have one with a quad core atom, 1GB of ram(!!!) And latest windows 10 1903 edition runs very nicely on it if you stick to the built-in apps. I usually have it next to my main PC as an additional monitor with the wireless projector functionality .
  - 0815test 7y ago
    I'll hazard a guess that your Win10 machine on 1GB RAM is swapping plenty. A lightweight Linux distribution can run a reasonable desktop workload (including some web browsing!) on 1GB with zilch swap use, or on as little as 512MB with tolerable use of swap. It's a bit disappointing in a way, but Linux (and not even every Linux distro, for that matter) is the only OS where I can visibly tell that I'm running something reasonably bloat-free, and it makes the UX incredibly snappy and comfortable all-around.
    - StillBored 7y ago
      Well, i'm here to say that if you use a normal linux distro with KDE or Gnome your going to be in the multiple GB's of ram pretty quick. Sure you can have a stripped down linux distro with X/lxde or whatever in under 1GB, but you can also use windows IoT or Core for much the same effect. The problem is that MS (and the mainstream linux DE's) aren't willing to admit that some of the "modernization" they have done over the last decade has done nothing but increase the visual lag while massively increasing the resource consumption for what is frequently little more than transparent windows (cause high DPI is still not quite there in both cases...).

philjohn 7y ago

Marginal gains. 50MB here, 100MB there ... pretty soon you're talking real storage usage.

hirsin 7y ago
Pretty much this. I once tried adding a new ~3 MB binary, and it was rejected on effectively these grounds. Now consider that the team making these in/out decisions has a backlog of requests just like it for larger items...
- pas 7y ago
  Is there a team that can exterminate other teams in very medieval ways that fail to make stuff installable to non system drive? Because there should be. It's crazy that everything still wants to put stuff on C:\ ... I'm looking at you Visual Studio and Win SDK. Plus Users\Public shared goodies. And the %userprofile%\AppData. I get that every application thinks it needs to put its cache/files there, but then why can't folks relocate users' homes? :/
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > Is there a team that can exterminate other teams in very medieval ways that fail to make stuff installable to non system drive? I'd love if that team would also take a look at Android, where you simply can't not install on the "system drive" aka. main phone flash.
    - hirsin 7y ago
      That was a design decision made because install to SD card causes apps to load slowly (to my understanding). It used to be possible but they killed it. Doesn't hurt that it helps speed up the upgrade cycle since users run out of on-board space sooner.
marcosdumay 7y ago
Some 10 of those and it makes some difference on a phone... In how many places does Windows concentrate the settings for everything?

blablabla123 7y ago

Yes but isolated registry backups make as much sense as a full backup of a modern Linux Desktop's /etc folder. Probably not much. The config's content depends a lot on the things installed and vice-versa, even more so on Windows (unless they changed something fundamentally since 7). At least on Linux and in particular Ubuntu (Desktop) installations I aim for as little manual configuration changes as possible anyways, so updates don't break things...

outworlder 7y ago
If you backup etc and home, you can pretty much restore a linux machine back to working order. Yes, you might be missing packages in a brand new install, but then the extra files are harmless. People put etc in git even: https://joeyh.name/code/etckeeper/ https://joeyh.name/code/etckeeper/ The registry is much more magical and it is difficult to find and remove cruft, so I suppose there's an argument against it.
- la_barba 7y ago
  >If you backup etc and home, you can pretty much restore a linux machine back to working order. Hmm, I've never done this. In terms of config files, are there never any breaking changes between versions? Like ..is a v1.0 config file always guaranteed to work with v2.0 and vice versa? I guess and a related question - what is the best way to determine if an /etc/ config file isn't required?
  - velosol 7y ago
    Usually breaking changes are highlighted in your update cycle and if something is added or slightly modified you might find a *.conf.rpmnew or similar. rpmconf [1] helps with those sorts of updates. [1]: https://github.com/xsuchy/rpmconf https://github.com/xsuchy/rpmconf
  - rincebrain 7y ago
    Stuff can break - there's not especially strong guarantees across versions, but if I, say, took /etc and /home from a Debian stretch system and put them on another Debian system, it would likely mostly Just Work. It gets more exciting the further you drift - e.g. if you're going to Debian buster, or something more significantly different like Fedora/RH, you'd probably want to cherrypick config changes from /etc, though /home should be fine(tm).

agumonkey 7y ago

Of all the stuff crammed automatically on Windows 10 install .. they can't be serious about saving space. I had to powershell candycrush off the drive for god's sake.

Dylan16807 7y ago
The candycrush install trigger is annoying but mere KB, it's not disk space bloat.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  I'm not sure it's always the case. They were accounted for hundreds of MB. Removing them (many games) increased free space.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    Looking into it further, apparently windows keeps a secret cache even after you uninstall those apps, so powershell is necessary not just to remove the install trigger but to remove that extra copy. Thanks, windows.