So I was testing my edited windows on a virtual machine, and I gave it 10GB of hard drive space. Well next thing I new it, it was full. I dug around and I found it was the winsxs folder in the windows folder. The folder is almost 6GB's!! I dont know why its so big, its never happened before to me. Any suggestions?

Shadow

This post has been edited by x-Shadow-x: Jul 21 2008, 03:41 PM

That's perfectly normal. Mine's even bigger (closer to 7)

Wow really? Mine is about 2 gig. Thanks crahak.

The more apps you install, the more assemblies (ad different version of it) get installed, the bigger that directory is going to grow.

The thing is, I havent install ANY programs yet.

Sounds like you changed to Vista 64?

Nope, its 32, and a clean install.

I've found that using vLite to strip out all languages but the actual one you're going to use reduces the SXS folder size to a more manageable ~1.8GB after x64 install (not sure about x86). I've actually got everything installed on this box (including VS 2008) and I'm only at ~4.5GB, which is smaller than a base x64 OS without stripping languages was (about 6GB after install).

Well I havent striped out anything yet, so im used to the "small" folder of my striped out version.

mines around the 12GB mark on vista x64

I can verify this. I was running out of HD space on some older machines that I put Vista on and stripping the languages works wonders.

Is there an easy way to strip out those languages post install? I mean really, this is an absurd way of keeping backups. No wonder Vista is so hated by everybody I know. That folder alone is taking up more space than the total room required by ALL software I ever used plus Windows XP x64.

Search the forums for "vlite".

I wrote "post install", not "pre install".

With vlite you REMOVE the languages you don't want with vlite.

With vlite you create an install image. What I wanted to know was a method NOT requiring a reinstall of the entire OS.

Short of going in and hacking away at it (and praying for the best), no there's no way of shrinking this folder easily (or maybe at all). This was discussed here awhile back as well, with some success by some people and epic failure by others, IIRC. You can probably find that thread if you do a quick search and want to read up on it.