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#1
Windows folder size is huge and taking over my hard drive - by design?
I've been working on a thorough system cleanup in an attempt to get my hard drive usage down to a minimum. The Windows folder (C: Windows) has been by biggest obstacle. I couldn't believe it was taking up 22GB of space even after running both CCleaner and Windows Disk Cleanup. I've been reading and researching all night, both on this forum and elsewhere and the answer appears to be that "winsxs" (inside the Windows folder and now at 11GB on my system) is designed to continue growing endlessly as it adds more dll files every time you install a program and it never deletes the files even after you've uninstalled the program. This explains why I see reports of people's Windows folder ranging from 10MB to 34MB. Wow, I remember just a couple years ago when WindowsXP, all my programs, documents, photos and audio files only took up 20 to 25GB.
I'm not inclined to be a complainer or criticize people who have built an entire operating system when I still struggle to point, click and make a program work. I'm thoroughly impressed with people who can design, program and create such an impressive and infinitely complex object as an operating system. Nevertheless, it does strike my simplistic, common sense mind as being a bit regressive to go from an OS (XP) that takes up 7GB on my old system to one (7) that takes up 22GB on my new system - and all to run pretty much the same software and do pretty much the same things, at least from a users point of view.
So if I'm understanding this situation correctly (please correct me if I'm wrong and there is a way to clean out some of those dlls and get my OS back to 10-15GB of disk space), then I guess I'm asking that someone pass along the idea of designing future systems so that old dlls can be deleted and the OS will never grow beyond the size of the original install + updates + dlls for just those programs currently installed. Meanwhile, I'll definitely be sticking to XP on my older systems that have less disk space.