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  #31  
Old July 7th 18, 09:20 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
s|b
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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/

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  #32  
Old July 7th 18, 09:42 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Mayayana
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"KenW" wrote

| So how do I delete hiberfil.sys ???
|
| From an Admistrator's Command Prompt powercft -h off


I guess that's fine, but I don't remember ever having
to do anything special to delete it, as long as it's not
in use. Same with pagefile.sys. As long as it's moved
off of C drive, the file should delete without problems
after a reboot.


  #33  
Old July 8th 18, 12:52 AM posted to alt.windows7.general,alt.comp.os.windows-10
Paul[_32_]
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Char Jackson wrote:
On Sat, 7 Jul 2018 14:25:06 -0400, Keith Nuttle
wrote:

On 7/7/2018 12:54 PM, Char Jackson wrote:
On Sat, 7 Jul 2018 10:19:55 -0400, Keith Nuttle
wrote:

I am the one who suggested deleting files in SoftwareDistribution, and I
can confirm that this folder can take up a lot of space. I never
checked the exact number of bytes, but I know I have spent hours
deleting the files.
Hi Keith,
I'm curious to hear why it took hours to delete those files, when I
think it should have taken less than a minute. Do you have any thoughts
on what was going on?

Yes!
First there were many folders, sub folders and files. I have selected
all files in a folder and it has shown 6000 files area being deleted.

Second it was on my tablet which is limited memory and a slow processor.

I found an article mentioned earlier in this thread, and was shocked a
the number of files I found in this folder. When you are deleting that
many files even on a faster computer it takes some time.


The tablet is a touch tablet, which makes makes it a pain to make the
inputs, and I have never found how to do the operation mouse operation
Click, Shift Click to select multiple files on the touch screen.
Even if you do a select all, and delete; with thousands of files you
never know if the system is hung up or is working. (I can be a bit
impatient.) This is how I learned about setting the immediate delete
parameter in the Recycle bin.


Thanks, Keith, and thanks also to Paul for contributing his experience,
as well. I guess I've seen something similar when I needed to delete
over 100,000 jpg images and it took much longer than I expected. Not
hours, but several minutes, as I recall. On XP, that same operation used
to take about 10-20 seconds.


There is a stark difference, between how Explorer.exe
works when dealing with files, and how a shell-level
FindNext works.

I can do "dir" in a Command Prompt window, and easily list
8 million files in the window. They're sorted in alphabetical
order in three columns. That means the command knew pretty
close to the beginning of the output, what it had to do.

Explorer.exe on the other hand, fails in the simplest
and least taxing of situations. It should be a
"case study for CS class" for somebody.

What I can't figure out, is how "dir" and FindNext
are able to sort a 40GB $MFT in no time at all, and
start outputting file names... in alphabetical order.
It's fast enough that "there's got to be a trick".

Whereas with File Explorer, around 1 million files is
a practical upper limit for "expecting the window
to ever paint". And you can find/create failure
test cases for Explorer with as few as 60,000 files
in a single folder (the window will have a "busy icon"
forever).

Paul
  #34  
Old July 8th 18, 01:00 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
Paul[_32_]
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Mayayana wrote:
"KenW" wrote

| So how do I delete hiberfil.sys ???
|
| From an Admistrator's Command Prompt powercft -h off


I guess that's fine, but I don't remember ever having
to do anything special to delete it, as long as it's not
in use. Same with pagefile.sys. As long as it's moved
off of C drive, the file should delete without problems
after a reboot.


Turning off hibernation

powercfg /? # check the syntax on your OS

powercfg -h off # disabling hibernation
powercfg /h off

deletes the hiberfile and the space it took.

It's possible to set the hiberfile to a "percentage"
of system RAM. The hiberfile is likely using a light-weight
compressor, so a 50% to 75% size should be sufficient.

If you're a pathological user, someone who fills RAM
on purpose with random data and holds the data there,
then you might succeed in preventing hibernation from
working properly. A Verilog or VHDL simulator could be
used to achieve such a result. Or you could run Microsoft
ICE on a panorama, then hibernate in the middle of a calc.

Only the portion of RAM mapped as "active" is recorded.
An idle desktop, could in principle be written out
as a 350MB image. Even if your hiberfile has a static
allocation 50GB in size, only the first 350MB would
need to be written in that case. Since it's hard to
study hibernation, I don't know if "cache spaces" are
recorded in the hiberfile, or if the OS is clever enough
to only record the minimal resources to make things work.
It should be flushing the System Write Cache before
contemplating shutdown, and only then doing the
Hibernate math.

Paul
  #35  
Old July 8th 18, 01:14 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
Paul[_32_]
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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
  #36  
Old July 8th 18, 01:50 AM posted to alt.windows7.general,alt.comp.os.windows-10
Char Jackson
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On Sat, 07 Jul 2018 19:52:54 -0400, Paul wrote:

There is a stark difference, between how Explorer.exe
works when dealing with files, and how a shell-level
FindNext works.

I can do "dir" in a Command Prompt window, and easily list
8 million files in the window. They're sorted in alphabetical
order in three columns. That means the command knew pretty
close to the beginning of the output, what it had to do.

Explorer.exe on the other hand, fails in the simplest
and least taxing of situations. It should be a
"case study for CS class" for somebody.

What I can't figure out, is how "dir" and FindNext
are able to sort a 40GB $MFT in no time at all, and
start outputting file names... in alphabetical order.
It's fast enough that "there's got to be a trick".

Whereas with File Explorer, around 1 million files is
a practical upper limit for "expecting the window
to ever paint". And you can find/create failure
test cases for Explorer with as few as 60,000 files
in a single folder (the window will have a "busy icon"
forever).


I've wondered the same things and I have no real answers. If they really
wanted to, I'm sure they could address each of those performance issues,
but I can only conclude that they don't want to.

  #37  
Old July 8th 18, 02:58 AM posted to alt.windows7.general,alt.comp.os.windows-10
Mayayana
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"Paul" wrote

| There is a stark difference, between how Explorer.exe
| works when dealing with files, and how a shell-level
| FindNext works.
|
| I can do "dir" in a Command Prompt window, and easily list
| 8 million files in the window. They're sorted in alphabetical
| order in three columns. That means the command knew pretty
| close to the beginning of the output, what it had to do.
|

Explorer is using FindFirstFile/FindNextFile and
may even be using something better under the
surface -- Microsoft's private stock. But it also
has to deal with showing icons, calculating time
remaining with deletes, managing shell extensions,
etc. In other words, the API is just dealing with
the file system. Explorer is primarily GUI functionality.
And it's still tied into IE.

If you look at it in Depends or a similar program
you can see that kernel and ntdll are only a small
part of what Explorer is dealing with It's loading
wininet (IE) to parse URLs, uxtheme for the GUI
theme, user32 for drawing and tracking down user
display preferences, gdi for display, some unnamed
functions from shdocvw (IE again).... Plus there are
things like ole, browseui.dll and version.dll for
collecting file info, properties, default icon, media
info, etc. If you're going to deal with files in a folder
in the Windows GUI, all of that comes into play.



  #38  
Old July 8th 18, 03:01 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
Ant[_2_]
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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/


Mine is almost 9 GB even though my 64-bit W7 HPE SP1 is from October
2016 and kept updated. I even use Disk Cleanup monthly to remove its
WUs.

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farms. What's the matter, a little tense about the flight?" --Lloyd
Christmas (Dumb and Dumber movie)
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  #39  
Old July 8th 18, 03:02 AM posted to alt.windows7.general,alt.comp.os.windows-10
Stan Brown
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On Sat, 7 Jul 2018 09:47:48 -0400, Big Al wrote:

On 07/07/2018 08:44 AM, Stan Brown wrote:
"C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution"

I have 881,877,855 bytes in 30 files and 32 dirs under this one. Are
we sure that it's okay to delete all of them. This won't for example,
cause Windows Update to take many hours next time I run it?

You sure there is close to a Tera Byte of data
there? Wow.


Nope -- close to a gigabyte.

I think it was Heinlein who said all large numbers were the same. :-)


--
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http://BrownMath.com/
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
Shikata ga nai...
  #40  
Old July 8th 18, 03:04 AM posted to alt.windows7.general,alt.comp.os.windows-10
Stan Brown
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On Sat, 7 Jul 2018 10:19:55 -0400, Keith Nuttle wrote:
One tip for the person with the problem. Before you start deleting
files in this directory, go into the properties of the Recycle bin
properties and check "Don't move files to Recycle bin. Remove files
immediately when deleted" This will make the process go smoothly.


Or, use Shift-Delete instead of Delete. That bypasses the Recycle Bin
for that one operation only, so that you don't need to remember to go
back and change your Recycle Bin settings a second time.


--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://BrownMath.com/
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
Shikata ga nai...
  #41  
Old July 8th 18, 03:05 AM posted to alt.windows7.general,alt.comp.os.windows-10
Stan Brown
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On Sat, 7 Jul 2018 14:25:06 -0400, Keith Nuttle wrote:
The tablet is a touch tablet, which makes makes it a pain to make the
inputs, and I have never found how to do the operation mouse operation
Click, Shift Click to select multiple files on the touch screen.


Ctrl+A selects all files in the current folder.

Of course there's also the command prompt.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://BrownMath.com/
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
Shikata ga nai...
  #42  
Old July 8th 18, 03:08 AM posted to alt.windows7.general,alt.comp.os.windows-10
Stan Brown
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On Sat, 07 Jul 2018 19:52:54 -0400, Paul wrote:
What I can't figure out, is how "dir" and FindNext
are able to sort a 40GB $MFT in no time at all, and
start outputting file names... in alphabetical order.
It's fast enough that "there's got to be a trick".


I think the file entries in an NTFS system are maintained in a
structure that lends itself to alphabetical searches. It's why pretty
much anything you do -- copy, for instance -- is in alphabetical
order in NTFS but not in FAT32.



--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://BrownMath.com/
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
Shikata ga nai...
  #43  
Old July 8th 18, 03:15 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
Mayayana
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"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:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
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.



  #44  
Old July 8th 18, 03:23 AM posted to alt.windows7.general,alt.comp.os.windows-10
J. P. Gilliver (John)[_4_]
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In message , Stan Brown
writes:
On Sat, 7 Jul 2018 14:25:06 -0400, Keith Nuttle wrote:
The tablet is a touch tablet, which makes makes it a pain to make the
inputs, and I have never found how to do the operation mouse operation
Click, Shift Click to select multiple files on the touch screen.


Ctrl+A selects all files in the current folder.


Yes, but Keith might have wanted to select, say, 7 files, or a range of
files, rather than all of them.

Of course there's also the command prompt.

--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

It's OK to be tight on
The seafront at Brighton
But I say, by Jove
Watch out if it's Hove.
- Sister Monica Joan, quoted by Jennifer Worth (author of the Call the
Midwife books, quoted in Radio Times 19-25 January 2013)
  #45  
Old July 8th 18, 03:25 AM posted to alt.windows7.general
Mayayana
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"Ant" wrote

| Mine is almost 9 GB even though my 64-bit W7 HPE SP1 is from October
| 2016 and kept updated. I even use Disk Cleanup monthly to remove its
| WUs.
|
9 GB. Chicken feed.
If you do a search for winsxs GB you'll find 20, 30, 60....
There's no limit to the madness.

I had a Vista laptop with 80 GB used. It was
updated to 7 and still took up 80 GB of space.
(Very little software.) I had to reinstall Vista
from scratch, then do the update, in order to
clean out the mess.



 




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