Losing HDD Space

I just did a semiclean install and clocked in at just over 16 gb. I've installed a few small programs and now i'm up over 22gb. I've already done all the obvious things such as turning off system restore, turning off hibernation, removing sp1 install files, etc. The biggest problem is my winsxs folder, which windows explorer puts at 11.1gb. I've read that this number may be a little inflated, but it's right in line with tune up utilities 09. I don't want to delete something useful, but the size of this folder is crazy. I've done some research on the point of this folder, but i never had problems in xp with dlls and i could install xp twice in the size this folder occupies. There is 3gb worth of microsoft-windows-naturallanguage6 files. Microsoft-windows-moviesamples is 150 mb. There is also an into movie for media center that's 50mb. Are there files that I can safely delete or do I just have to bend over and take it?

 

What about system restore points?

Its possibly those that take up a few GB.

Use the Windows Disk Cleanup utility to remove them (unless you want to keep them) - CCleaner can do it too nowadays.

 

I have system restore turned off and all the restore points deleted. AFAIK, I've done all the normal steps to free up hdd space. How big is your winsxs folder? Is the size of mine normal?

 

No idea abougt mine - but just checking folder sizes won't gove you anything - I have in excess of 15GB of software for example.

 

Windows does sometimes inflate in size a little. The only other reason I can think of off the top of my head is a virus or something installing stuff in the background.

 

Yeah, but it might still give me an idea of normal sizes for this folder. If you have 15gb of software and I have 150mb of software and my winsxs folder is larger, I would know something is screwed up with my system. I have a hard time believing that the winsxs folder should be larger than all of the rest of the windows folder.

 

If you're considering doing a complete clean install, you can use nlite (for XP) or vlite (for Vista) to remove those language packs. I never used those, and eliminated them via these programs to save space.
If you're doing a semi-clean install, then it may have been leftovers in the process. I wouldn't recommend deleting them, since who knows whether there are other dependencies somewhere.

 

WinSxS really needs to be big. Among other things, it acts as a repository for different DLL versions, which avoids the "dll hell" of earlier Windows versions.
On a 32-bit system, a normal size for it is 5-7 GB, depending on how much you have installed. With 64-bit windows, you need both 32-bit and 64-bit version of libraries, where both exist, and with 64-bit libraries being bigger in the first place, 11 GB is quite normal.

That said, the disk usage isn't as bad as it looks. Vista supports hard links, where a file stored on the disk can appear to be in two or more places. For most of the "copies" in WinSxS, they're not really copies, but hardlinks. So a DLL can exist in, say, Program Files\Common Files\ and in WinSxS at the same time, appearing to take up twice the space it actually does. If looking at the disk as a whole, the used space won't be counted twice, but if you look at all the directories and sum them up, you'll get a much larger number than the actual disk usage, precisely due to hardlinks (called "junctions" in Microsoft terminology).

 

Is there a way to use nlite on the sony.wim? I would like to do a semi clean install with the option to clean it up a bit.

 

Judging by the size and contents of WinSxS it IS a "dll hell." All DLLs are cast there for their sins.

A simple check of partition size and size of part occupied by files (actually used clusters) using any low level partitioning program will reveal that that is not true. It's just an excuse used by Microsoft that works on many users.

Just putting original Vista setup from DVD (2 - 4 GB) on HD and assuming that a user will need 500 MB of various old version DLLs will result in less space used and still not require inserting Vista DVD.

Have not checked what they did in Windows 7. Let's hope that "dll hell" will be gone eventually, as it did in Windows XP. Windows XP does not have "dll hell", why was it introduced by Vista is beyond me.

 

Just to be clear, which is it that you are surprised over: the 16gb install or the +6gb added from software?

16gb seems very normal if you add in the basic Sony utilities and drivers to a clean install. I just did a clean install and that's what it came down to.

 

The 16gb is big, but normal for vista so that is not the point of this thread(but i would like to know how to use vlite to slim down the sony.wim). But i don't know why installing a few hundred mb of updates a programs results in a 6gb increase in hdd space.

 

Yes Win XP had DLL hell, every version of Windows has had it. It is the nature of re-usable DLL's. Under XP the cure for DLL was WinSxs, with Vista the coverage of thath solution was expanded. But it is still flawed. See my signature line for details of why I think it is flawed but necessary.

Gary

 

The difference between vista and windows 7 is pretty big. There is about 6-7 gb difference in the size of windows. I have office and adobe sp3 installed in 7 and it's still over 1gb smaller than a similarly configured vista.

 

No, you don't have Windows 7. You have Windows 7 RC, which isn't Windows 7. Once Windows 7 is goes silver, expect manifest files for every executable and library. That will bump up WinSxS to Vista levels.

 

Why would the manifests not be in the RC??? Not saying they are, just curious why the RC would not have them since it is an RC and not a beta. And having said that, I am not sure why a beta would not have the manifests too.

Gary

 

My winsxs fold is 5.7gb for win 7 RC versus 13.1gb for vista. Granted, I think the 5.7gb is still massive, but a definite improvement. I surely hope that it doesn't bloat up any more before release.

 

You know that this value is a huge overestimate?

And by the way, the reported size for me was roughly 7GB after I had my System working for 8 months... and installed an unistalled a lot too...

But as I said, the reported size is untrue.

 

Because they still need to do things like "here, try whether this library solves the problem". Without manifests, you simply copy the library (or binary) in and it will be used. That's VERY useful for beta testing.

(With manifests, if you copy the file in, and it doesn't match the manifest, the one in WinSxS will be used instead. So you need to release a complete installer package just to test out a small change in a single file.)

 

Easy to verify. Right-click on drive c: and select Propeties. The sizes in that dialog are counted purely against file allocation table (i.e. allocated clusters). The currently occupied space will include hibernation file as well as paging file and restore points, etc. It will count WinSxS correctly and honestly - clusters are clusters whether there are 10 hard links to them or just one.

I have paging and hibernation turned off, restore points cleaned/removed, hardly anything installed besides OS, and it totals 16.4 GB. Unacceptable. I suppose I could accept 8 GB given other advantages of OS.

Oh, and in Windows XP WinSxS is 40 MB - that's almost nothing.

 

No. That size is wrong - WinSXS isn't a normal folder.

This will in this case report files that are located elsewhere.

You may get a reported 3GB and WinSXS is only 400MB large.

And if you take the whole C drive you'll have all your programmes too.

Honestly, I don't know why people care - HDDs have grown so large...

 

That's a crappy excuse for this. SSDs are still small, plus I would like to use the space on my hdd for things that I want.

 

Read about what WinSXS actually does and you'll find out that it is useful.

The reason its small is that it wasn't good in XP.

In fact, there is a good post here on NBR.

And I think you are just on an anti-Vista rant.

Vista isn't perfect - but its not bad.

 

I have read the reasoning behind it, but why do I need a ton of copies of a dll that only a single program uses, or one that i'm not using at all? Plus, I've never had a problem with xp or earlier with dlls. And this isn't an anti vista rant, I don't have many problems with vista in fact. But this is a pretty big one to me as on my notebooks, hdd space is at a premium. I hope they come up with a more innovative solution than redundant copies. Somebody needs to code an app that would go through the folder and remove all the dlls that aren't in use.

 

If you think there are "a ton of copies" you have not understood how this works.

Hardlinks do not take up extra space -- they just make the same file visible in more than one place. Think of it as if your house sits in between two streets, with a street address on each street. That does not turn it into two houses. The house hasn't been copied. If counting houses for each street, your house will be counted twice. But if summing up houses in the city, it should only be counted once.
(And yes, this confuses the abstract thinking challenged members of our species, like politicians and the police, which is why most cities only allow a house to have a single address.)

The advantage of WinSxS is that if you have program one that uses library.dll, and then install program two with an incompatible version of library.dll, program one will still continue to work, because the original dll isn't gone from the disk -- it can still be found in WinSxS.

That said, there is one very bad side to WinSxS, and that is that by design it does not allow a library to be upgraded for all files that use it. This means that memory usage can skyrocket, because each application may load its own version of a library, even if the different versions are 100% compatible.
And it means that a security fix may not necessarily fix the program for all applications -- some of them will continue to use their own WinSxS provided and insecure versions. Patches have to check for manifests and update the manifests to allow the new patched version.
In a way, WinSxS defeats the whole purpose behind shared libraries -- that they are shared. You might as well link statically, and get a speed benefit.

There are reasons to criticize WinSxS, but the disk usage is NOT one of them.

 

Thanks for the explanation.

Gary

 

See the link in my signature line for my take on WinSXS. It has a good purpose, no doubt. But the design, in my mind has a serious flaw.

Gary

 

This talk about WinSxS taking just 400 MB is not substantiated. Please, provide instructions on how to measure the actual difference, what tool(s) to use, and how to be able to use that space. Otherwise, if even OS itself cannot report disk space properly, that space is lost for all intents and purposes. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.

One way to deal with it is to have files symlinked (soft-linked) and turn links into hard links as necessary. I am sure I will never use the majority of that stuff. Soft links will show as taking 4 kB per.

 

There are several threads here in NBR that deal with this, some with links to technical articles spelling out how the OS most assuredly DOES overstate the space taken up by WinSXS. I don't have time to search for the messages here but I am sure you can find them if you want to read more on this.

Gary

 

No. This is a truism that is patently false -- the logic doesn't hold up to scrutiny. If you've never seen a pygmy goose, you would then call it a duck.

More to the point here, you're walking in front of a prism glass window, and see a bunch of what you think are ducks, and incorrectly conclude that there must be a paddling of them, filling up the entire yard.

In reality, all you can tell is that there is probably at least one duck-like animal, or a good facsimile. I say "probably", because you can only see one side. It might be half a duck, for all you know (to collapse the metaphor, a sparse file).

No, that will not work. Symlinks work fundamentally different from hardlinks.

Create a hardlink from A to B, then delete B. A will continue to show the content.
Create a symlink from A to B, then delete B. A will now be a dangling symlink.

Also, by doing a stat() on a file, you can count how many hardlinks there are to it. There's no way of knowing how many symlinks points to a file.
This becomes important if you uninstall, and need to know whether to delete the file or not.

Again, no, because "as necessary" is beyond your control. The whole point of WinSxS is that it saves you when you do NOT have control -- when something ELSE deletes your files or replaces them with an incompatible version.

 

@arth1: Right, what I considered "trash" is, in fact, "garbage." Big difference (pygmy goose can be considered duck just like Vista/Windows 7 does not make distinction between hard links and actual files when counting space)
My point is: if WinSxS indeed takes much less space physically, the OS must have means to calculate and display it correctly; or else it's a serious bug in OS implementation. Imagine local government counting your street corner house twice and taxing your property accordingly. Wouldn't you complain?

Oh, and my low-level test of partition used space still stands. It's an honest representation of actual space used with all hard-linking, etc. accounted for.

For the record, I don't mind Vista footprint on a desktop where I have plenty of disk space. I do mind it for laptop and for virtual machines. And the latter still defy 400 MB WinSxS theory too. When 256 GB and 512 GB SSD are cheap I'll reconsider my reservations on Vista/Win 7 footprint for laptop. Probably in a year or so.

 

Wouldn't this by definition mean that there are 2 copies of said dll? Seems to me that if x-1=1, then x has to be 2.

 

Your premise is wrong -- the "-1" doesn't apply to the file, but the file header.

What happens on the disk when you create a file is (very simplified):

The file takes up blocks 1234 to 1256
An "inode" (a special block) is created that records the blocks used, as well as file permissions and a usage counter.
An entry is made for the file name that points to the inode, and the usage counter is bumped up by 1.

You then create a hardlink to the file:

An entry is made for the new file name that points to the inode, and the usage counter in the inode is bumped up by 1.

Neither of these are "copies" of the other -- there is no original and no copy. Both names point to the same file.

When you delete either of the two, the pointer to the inode is deleted, and the counter decremented by 1. Unless it hits zero, the inode is left alone.