"Paul" wrote
| 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.)
|
I don't believe that's true. It's absurd for them
to claim the bloat isn't really there. Even if it weren't,
if Windows thinks it is that's the same thing. We've
talked about this before. When they first started bloating
out winsxs and making a mess I researched it to see
what the options are. I found these two fundamentally
conflicting quotes:
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http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2...isk-space.aspx
Microsoft President Steven Sinofsky (now former President) and his assistant
said: ...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. ...The actual amount of storage consumed varies,
but on a typical system it is about 400MB.
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/a...-so-large.aspx
The "Windows Server Core Team" said: All of the components in the operating
system are found in the WinSxS folder - in fact we call this location the
component store. ...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.
-------------------------------------------------------------
So the company president and the main programmers
each have an entirely different story about how it works.
The whole idea of "hard linking makes no sense in the
first place. It's as unnecessarily confusing as having
non-functional, fake folders that mimic pre-7 app data
paths. There's no need to show those fake folders in
order for Explorer to perform a virtualization rerouting
of files for non-conforming software.
They're copying all the drivers from the install disk
into winsxs. They also seem to be copying every single
system file, in any version, that comes through. If
you have an AMD-32 you'll still have Intel-64 files and
vice versa. There are thousands of things you
couldn't possibly ever need, so they're certainly not
reflections from the system folder.
| 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.
I've done that. The whole system was broken.
The Computer window showed no disks at all. It
worked if I copied the whole thing to another
partition, but not if I deleted it.
| 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.
All bull****. As the quotes above show, they've
created an extremely brittle, bloated system, they're
not being honest about how it works, and
it's not realistically subject to manipulation. Trying
to calculate something like how much space you
can save ca't even be trusted. You just have to live
with it. But with disk imaging you can at least go
back to base level when the crap gets out of hand.