…unless Im seriously missing something, but other online forums indicate not…

The winsxs directory on my build is getting massive, touching 10Gb now. That together with the pagefile and hiberfil takes my OS directory space over 20Gb.

No problem says you with your 1TB HDDzzzzzzz…

Problem says I with my 32Gb SSD

trying to keep OS and Apps on the SSD, but now having to keep a watchful eye as it’s running at 2Gb free space at the moment.

Apparently there’s nothign you can do to the winsxs directory without seriously undermining the integrity of the OS.

Love W7 except for this.

Going to have to seriously consider a rebuild to get the winsxs down in size and installing other apps on a separate drive instead 🙁

No idea … but I’d recommend posting on the TSF. The mods and other experts over there really know their stuff.

cheers sm. been thru a load of techie forums and it’s clear there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it. Much of the threads have been around vista and less so W7 because HDD sizes have got so big.

Unfortunately there’s no sanctioned “cure” for the problem. Seems silly that there isnt the capacity to tidy up duplicates or at least relocate winsxs 🙁

Move the pagefile to the retro magnetic HDD. Although that may then become a performance bottleneck. How much RAM do you have? Either that or reduce the size of the pagefile so it’s fixed rather than dynamically managed by windows.

Do you use the hibernate option in windows 7? If not disable it and it will delete the hyberfill.sys file.

disable hibernate mode in cmd with powercfg -h off

I always fix my pagefile size, never sure why you’d want it dynamic – I usually fix it around 2x my ram size, but currently only 1x on a 4gig machine and never run into any probs. I’ll have to check out the winsxs folder, never known it be a problem.

intersting ideas.

I think my pagefile is 4Gb? I have 2x4Gb RAM.

I dont use hibernate so could get rid of it, but have had to crash out of OS a few times lately because of a Graffix card failure. It resumes on start up, im presuming from the hiberfil. However, I think Ive solved the graffix card problem so could probably take the gamble now.

Even if it does crash out, I never leave anything unsaved.

Another option that might recover some space if you’ve installed Win 7 SP1 is to make it a perminant installation.

Instructions here

you could try turning on ntfs compression on your c: drive

tried that stu, but it didnt seem to do anything.

thanks for the link dan – ill look at it when Im not behind this firewall.

You thought 32Gb was going to be enough! 😆

Hibernation takes up a few gb, why keep the apps on the SSD, move them to another drive, and keep the scratch files & frequently used data on the SSD. Otherwise, get yourself a bigger SSD. 😉

Gotta love W7!

Here’s the info from Dan’s link:

DISM /online /Cleanup-Image /SpSuperseded
The command needs to be run from an elevated command prompt and you cannot uninstall the Service Pack after it completes..

A few people have said it reduces from 10 to 5ish gb.

never thought of that milkie! 🙄

Going to have to seriously consider a rebuild to get the winsxs down in size and installing other apps on a separate drive instead

Shift your page file for a start. You don’t want it on an SSD unless you’re planning of replacing the drive in the next six months.

I always disable suspend-to-disk too, causes more problems than it solves, but that’s just me.

Oh, and on the subject of WinSxS,

A lot of the data in WinSxS isn’t there; a lot of it is hardlinks to data which is actually in other directories.

cougar, do you agree with much in here:

http://lifehacker.com/#!5426041/understanding-the-windows-pagefile-and-why-you-shouldnt-disable-it

Here, from the horse’s mouth.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2008/11/19/disk-space.aspx

The Windows SxS directory represents the “installation and servicing state” of all system components. But in reality it doesn’t actually consume as much disk space as it appears when using the built-in tools (DIR and Explorer) to measure disk space used.
…
In practice, 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. For instance in the WinSxS there might be a file called advapi32.dll that takes up >700K however what’s being reported is a hard link to the actual file that lives in the Windows\System32, and it will be counted twice (or more) when simply looking at the individual directories from Windows Explorer.

A lot of the data in WinSxS isn’t there; a lot of it is hardlinks to data which is actually in other directories.

seen that, but not much good if OS starts reporting space limits.

cougar, do you agree with much in here:

The link’s broken but I’ve read pro- and anti- swapfile arguments a-plenty.

Ultimately, the “disable your page file” brigade fundementally misunderstand what it’s for and how it works (which to be fair isn’t surprising, Windows memory management is a nasty beast to have to get your head round). It’s not simply an overflow for when you run out of RAM, it’s also a dumping ground for things that don’t need to be there.

Using a swapfile means that ‘dead’ data can be sidelined to give you more useable RAM. Windows uses RAM dynamically for its own nefarious means to optimise operations depending on what’s available. This leads to a counter-intuitive situation; people think that more memory being used is a bad thing – the reverse is true, it’s pointless having RAM just sitting there, so Windows will start stuffing it full of system caches and the like to speed things up.

If you’ve got half a gig of RAM sitting idle, would you rather it contained a file cache or some application data that you haven’t used in ten minutes? Page file, then.

not much good if OS starts reporting space limits.

True, but the point is, it’s a red herring when it comes to working out what to do about it.

(For the purposes of that post, “page file” and “swapfile” are intended to be synonymous. I type swapfile out of habit because I’m old, page file is the correct term here.)

hypothetically then, could an OS managed pagefile use real drivespace even if its shown as being full up under the fixed link reporting?

Ill move the pagefile to the HDD and disable hiberfil.

Should free up a sbit of breathing space. Then winsxs can balloon again and fill it!

Slightly OT, but I use a very small pagefile, and have 8gb of RAM in my system, as I read somewhere that limiting the size of the page file forces windows to use more of the RAM, which is faster and therefore a good thing, but disposing of it completely can cause some programs to get slightly confused and slow things down. Is this more or less correct, Cougar, or am I a complete idiot for believing stuff I read on teh interwebz?

Golden rule of pagefiles: unless you have proper, detailed knowledge of how they work, just leave them the hell alone. There is way too much BS on the internet already promising quick and easy performance fixes by increasing, decreasing, enabling or disabling them, most based on little more robust than “well, someone said to do this…”.

Suffice to say, the defaults that any recent version of Windows ships with do just fine – unless you’re in the 0.001% of people with specific needs, in which case take the time to fully understand what’s going on and make changes accordingly.

Disk cleanup wizard. It’s probably old system restore backup points from updates.

I had this with Vista.

noooooo it isnt grips.
It’s winsxs, clean dll repository.
restore points held on HDD.

simon_g – Member

Golden rule of pagefiles: unless you have proper, detailed knowledge of how they work, just leave them the hell alone. There is way too much BS on the internet already promising quick and easy performance fixes by increasing, decreasing, enabling or disabling them, most based on little more robust than “well, someone said to do this…”.

Suffice to say, the defaults that any recent version of Windows ships with do just fine – unless you’re in the 0.001% of people with specific needs, in which case take the time to fully understand what’s going on and make changes accordingly.

Plus one on this!

Oh, that’ll teach me to read the thread properly.

winsxs sounds familiar though.. hmm.. I think amybe I just deleted the offending stuff. Memory hazy… Maybe my pagefile is fragmented.

Odd I have no file size issue with Win7. Just had a look and my entire Windows dir is only 10~ Gig. I have installed from fresh and have SP1. Stoner was yours an upgrade from Vista or a fresh install?

Dez was saying something about album art thumbs being massive files too. Now I have 30+gigs of music and can’t see any album art files that big.

hypothetically then, could an OS managed pagefile use real drivespace even if its shown as being full up under the fixed link reporting?

I’m not sure I understand the question.

Do you mean “I’m using 55Gb on a 60Gb disk, can I add 10Gb to it because of the duplication?” sort of thing?

As I understand it, disk used / free will be reasonably accurate – the discrepancy would show if you were to add up all the used space manually. In honesty, I’ve never had cause to find out first hand before now so I’m not 100% sure.

I read somewhere that limiting the size of the page file forces windows to use more of the RAM, which is faster and therefore a good thing

See my previous post for reasons why this is a fallacy. However…

I use a very small pagefile, and have 8gb of RAM in my system

… I shou8ld’ve said, I’m talking specifically about 32-bit Windows systems here. Memory management under x64 is a whole other barrel of whelks.

I’d need to do a bit of research here I can make a fully informed comment, but my gut feeling is that the same principles are going to apply but it’ll be considerably less important than under an i386 archtecture due to the sheer amount of available RAM you’ve got to play with. If I were to guess, I’d say that you’re probably doing the right thing but it depends entirely on what you’re using the PC for.

There is way too much BS on the internet

Amen, brother. Everyone’s an expert.

Incidentally, I’ve found and read the Lifehacker article now. I’d concur with what the author is saying, on the whole; it’s a good article.

rich – it was a clean install, however, I have 2x versions of msoffice, some other bits and pieces and I regularly install and uninstall stuff, so i think that’s what creates all the duplicate file references.

ive also had to “detect and repair” excel 2003 a few times to remind it to be my default after 2010 has hijacked the default position. I wouldnt be surprised if that created a load of new duplicates as well…

Do you mean “I’m using 55Gb on a 60Gb disk, can I add 10Gb to it because of the duplication?” sort of thing?

yep that’s what I was trying to say in my mashed english.

Rich – how big is your winsxs file?

I use treeseize to keep an eye on things.

I install and uninstall loads of apps and am always tweaking registry settings, writing code, I host a wiki on this laptop. Still no problems with Win7 where XP really struggled.

My winxs folder is 5.8GB so quite a big bit of my entire Windows folder.

switch it off and then back on again and then give up and buy a mac….

aye carumba, my winsxs is also 10GB, with about 8GB free on my SSD. Hats off to Windows 7 though, this is the first time I’ve gone for more than 12 months without needing to reinstall Windows.

Hehe windows reports my winsxs to be 10 gig on my kitchen pc which has nothing more than win7 google chrome installed on it. My desktop machine has a 24gb winsxs 🙂

Just looked and it’s 4Gb on mine.

That 24Gb’er, is that a 64-bit installation perchance?

Certainly is, with a couple of fairly massive packages like solidworks, adobe creative suite and some others.

9.81 GB here – win7 64 professional (I think). Seems to have accumulated since July ’09

There’s also a “windows:old” folder that has a winsxs of 10+ – might just have to give that one the boot as only 12 gb space on C now. It’s just the backup version from a reinstall/upgrade isn’t it ?

You thought 32Gb was going to be enough!

That’s the problem!

scaredypants – windows.old is the previous C:\Windows. When you install Win7, it warns you of a previous OS, and tells you it will move the files to windows.old

simon_g – +1 over here too! To many ‘experts’ in IT…