hello world,
i know that the directory 'Winsxs' is the most discussed all over in the world,
but is possible to have some detailed informations ?

Which service rule this monster ? (>3Giga, over my PC)
is possible to reduce his dimension without destroy Vista?

Thanks for all tips,

A.

PS: sorry 4 my english

Windows side-by-side assemblies (WinSxS) are provided to alleviate dll-hell, and are basically collections of dlls, COM server components, and classes that are presented together to applications requiring one (or more) of these components as a specific version - take a look here for a little more info.

Long story short, you can remove these (with some guidance) from a WinPE disc, but doing so from an actual Windows installation can be dangerous.

myspacee, it was removed, or actually 95% of it in the vLite 0.9 but that caused hotfixes to fail on install, they probably need to update some parts of the WinSxS.

Thanks for reply,
'Winsxs' contains different directories, which can i 'safetely' remove ?

What vlite does, and which criteria follow to wash this ?

Thanks again

A.

Component Cache (winsxs) was only present in 0.9, it has been dropped in 0.95. It conflicted with Windows Update amonst others.

myspacee,

your best bet would be to not mess with sxs files, it will only cause you more headaches then it will be worth,

myspacee, that's the problem, if I knew which are safe I would keep that option. Tried to keep them half by half but hotfixes always failed. That makes me wonder if maybe something else was tampered...you should try it on your own, but only virtually of course, there are plenty of needed runtimes, not just component cache.

All the files so far that I have seen in winsxs are hardlinks. Removing winsxs may not save 1kb of space going by hdd space but may upset the updating process that the linked files elsewhere would expect. The way that Vista uses hardlinks on most of it's system files makes consideration of removing any file that is hardlinks as you need to consider it's linked counterpart and it's function elsewhere. Using NTFSLink shell extension that I use may show you the same in explorer as I see as it uses icon overlays to show you the hardlinks and junctions.