Windows folder taking more than 30GB space

[Alesha712]

HI guys,

My windows folder is getting bigger and now is 31 GB.
I ran CCLEANER and I did disc cleanup (+cleanup system files).

The folder "winsx" is taking 11.9 GB. I dont know if that should be that way.

What should I do?

thanx.

 

[pbcopter]

Welcome.

My Windows folder is 28.6 GB and the winsxs is 9.7 GB.
My Windows 7 x64 system was installed on January 27, 2013 and the sizes have been relatively stable since then.

Therefore, depending on the programs you have installed, I think your folder sizes are normal.


One thing you will find is most of what is reported in winsxs is not really located there but hard links (that take up no space) to other locations. In my case, only about 2 GB or so are real files.

See this

http://www.sevenforums.com/general-...folder-not-actually-consuming-lots-space.html

 

[whs]

Your numbers are not unusual. But if you want to know exactly what is taken the space, run WinDirStat.

PS - and do not touch winsxs. That would be a sure way to brick your system.

 

[Alesha712]

Thnx for the reply guys,
I read somewhere that the windows directory should take about 15 GB, but if you say its fine, I guess I live it the way it is.

THX =]

 

[whs]

There is no fixed number.

E.g. the pagefile and the hiberfile are the size of your RAM - each. If you have 8GB of RAM, that accounts already for 16GB.

The winsxs folder grows every time you install a program (with .dlls) and it does not shrink when you uninstall that program because the .dlls you collected stay forever.

The shadowstorage (where the restore points are) can be huge. That you can check with this command:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

For the rest, run WinDirStat and you will immediately see where the big chunks are.

 

[lehnerus2000]

CCleaner will show a list of all of the Restore Points for your OS (it doesn't show the sizes though).

Go to "Tools > System Restore".

 

[Layback Bear]

Here is more information on winsxs. More than most want to know. It's still a good read.

http://www.thewindowsclub.com/winsxs-folder-windows-7-8

After reading all of that at the bottom you will find this.

Conclusion
Let the WinSxS folder be as it is!

The end result after all that info is what whs has in his post #3

PS - and do not touch winsxs. That would be a sure way to brick your system.

I do use this by Bare Foot Kid. It might help and it might not.
Because it's a Windows program it doesn't hurt Windows 7.
Windows 7 always tries to protect itself if allowed to.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/76383-disk-cleanup-extended.html

 

[Urthboundmisfit]

The WinSxS is not as large as it "appears" to be; See this excellent post by Barman58 for an explanation.

 

[whs]

Winsxs is more of a directory than a folder in the classic sense.

 

[Urthboundmisfit]

In Win 8.1 you can determine the actual size of the WinSxS folder by running Dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore from an elevated command prompt.

For operating system files, it can appear that more than one copy of the same version of a file is stored in more than one place on the operating system, but there’s usually only one real copy of the file. The rest of the copies are just “projected” by hard linking from the component store. A hard link is a file system object that lets two files refer to the same location on disk. Some tools, such as the File Explorer, determine the size of directories without taking into account that the contained files might be hard linked. This might lead you to think that the WinSxS folder takes up more disk space than it really does.

Here's the output from my recently installed Win 8.1 Pro:

C:\Windows\system32>Dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore

...

Component Store (WinSxS) information:

Windows Explorer Reported Size of Component Store : 5.76 GB

Actual Size of Component Store : 5.67 GB

Shared with Windows : 4.53 GB
Backups and Disabled Features : 709.13 MB
Cache and Temporary Data : 450.87 MB

Date of Last Cleanup : 2014-11-14 05:20:50

Number of Reclaimable Packages : 0
Component Store Cleanup Recommended : No
The operation completed successfully.

The WinSxS folder shows in Explorer as 5.76 GB, but the actual overhead (the sum of the size of backups and disabled features and the size of cache and temp data) is 1.16 GB.