s|b wrote:
On Fri, 6 Jul 2018 08:25:27 -0700, freface wrote:

WinSxS has 13G in the folder.

https://www.howtogeek.com/174705/how-to-reduce-the-size-of-your-winsxs-folder-on-windows-7-or-8/


In that article, the "DISM /Cleanup-Image" sounds
like the most likely approach to actually removing
content from WinSXS.

Some of the other suggested mechanisms, rely on
*compression*, not deletion. I've had that stupid
cleanmgr.exe spin its wheels for 3 hours compressing
stuff for nothing. I don't consider compression to
be all that clever on non-tablet platforms with
huge hard drives. On a tablet with 32GB eMMC storage,
the compression approach makes sense (even if it's
wasting wear cycles on the flash).

And remember that WinSXS files are hard-linked into
other folders like System32. What this means is,
you can delete the entire contents of WinSXS, but
in a "well-managed" OS, the savings is only 500MB,
for all the file pointers that got deleted. (Likely
removed directory entries, not files themselves.)

Hardlinked files are double-counted when you do
Properties on a sub-tree of C: . The only "honest"
indicator in the OS, is the Properties of the
entire C: . The "pie chart" is accurate.

Purely as an experiment, you can

1) Do a full backup of C: .
2) Delete the contents of WinSXS. The OS should *still boot*.
What you've done, is made it impossible for Windows
Update to install anything ever again. You've deleted
the maintenance space. The clusters are shared by two
file pointers, and all you've done is delete
one file pointer - the second file pointer, all the
clusters, are still there and taking up space.
3) Now, go to the pie-chart properties of C: and
see how much space you saved. In the Explorer
window, you would swear you deleted 13GB of files,
but the pie chart is only 0.5GB smaller than it
used to be.
4) Restore your backup back in place of C: , to
keep your OS in a maintainable state.

This is why playing Whack-A-Mole with the directory
is basically a waste of time.

I have a more hopeful feeling towards "DISM /Cleanup-Image",
as I hear you can recover 1GB of space with it. (That might
have been a bread crumb from some IT people managing
..vhd files and virtualized server setups, who
were crying for ways to make their images smaller.
They would "pay big money" to save 1GB.)

Paul