Recent Story Comments

Bloated Vista

Mick Jugrim — Tue, 17 Dec 2013 20:02:29 +0000

I have just sent this complaint to a Windows Community site. At least it let's off some steam but I suppose I'll have to go for a re-install as Microsoft are criminally unhelpful.

On my laptop I have Windows Vista that is hogging 22GB of my hard drive (110GB) and I am appalled to Microsoft's attitude to this problem. Advice to delete a few temp files, etc. Or, as an alternative, reinstall the software. They are totally ignoring their responsibility to their customers. Talk about take the money and run!
Are there any plans to solve this problem? Perhaps it's an arm-twisting way of encouraging us to buy subsequent editions of operating software (It eventually gets so bad, and we get so fed up trying for a solution that we just give up and and go along with it)
Some of the postings state that Windows 7 suffers from the same problem; if this is true the engineers designing this software are either idiots or crooks - take your pick.

vista disk full

ross — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 10:11:28 +0000

I used the compcln.exe Gave me over a gigabyte. Not a lot but I was almost at the point that I'd have to buy a new computer or new HD, or a full reinstall or .... Thanks.

How to know folder size

Rony — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 23:09:40 +0000

Hi! I posted a little trick to get size of directories or files:
http://runakay.blogspot.com/2012/09/fastest-way-to-know-size-of-files-or...

Feeling like a veteran

Stephen — Thu, 24 May 2012 12:41:02 +0000

Thanks so much for all your helpful comments! I got alarmed today when I realized my 100gb drive now only had 25gb free. Found a folder size analyzer and discovered the winsxs cancer. <- nice term, btw! running my sp3 cleaning tool freed up at least 4gb. I'll take it!
reading other people's stories, the page seriously starts to sound like a windows coping community - shared misery, shared methods to help but mostly just coming together to recognize each other's pain.
hope you are all having a great day! this too shall pass!

Derr. Yeah that would be great

Twobob — Wed, 23 May 2012 11:40:45 +0000

Consider for a moment that other people may be operating under different constraints to you.

Fixed available size, remote cloud hosting etc.

Having to pay for HD space annually rather than just "Buying a bigger drive"

This is possibly one of the stupidest and least helpful comments on the subject I have ever read.

So incensed was I at the sheer blinkeredness of it that I fail I had to flame.

So flame on you sir. This subject wont be going away and it doesnt look like its going to get better.

the dir c:\windows\winsxs /s /ta >file.txt idea had promise...
a list of !!ESSENTIAL NOT TO REMOVE!! items from microsoft would go a long way to weeding out the possible prunings.

I am stuck with 20 Gig and almost 19 Gig of it is now winsxs.

Happy days, here's hoping I dont have to raze it to the ground.
And as for "buy a bigger drive". That's sadly not an option with this package.
Heh. Buy a bigger drive. Classic

Compcln.exe works perfectly

Leonardo — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:28:56 +0000

Thank you guys for this post. It helped me too much.

Snortin' Norton

Anonymous — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 02:50:39 +0000

Snortin' Norton is worse than many viruses!

Have you ever had to uninstall this pathetic sumbitch? Its tentacles reach to the far corners of your registry, and are completely immune to its ordinary uninstall process. Of course, Symantec provides a special "Norton Removal Tool", and has for years. Unfortunately, it is buried deeply within their website, far from prying eyes.

To be fair, many other major anti-virus applications are no better.

My Winsxs is 60 GB. (HELP!!!)

Jay — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 15:52:14 +0000

I have a vista 32-bit. I have never got SP1 or SP2 from MS. In the past three years, my winsxs grows bigger and bigger. I started to delete more and more programs until only Office is left, and other basic drivers. My hard drive is 69GB. I could not believe my winsxs is 60GB now. I only have 100MB left on C drive. It is too late for me to get SP1 or SP2. If SP1 or SP2 can delete some old file, why can't Microsoft issues some tool for user to handle winsxs manually.
My other option is to clone the C drive to a bigger hard drive. Anyone knows how to do that?
Please help. How could Microsoft let winsxs grow like that? Itself is a cancer!!!

winsxs ghosts & gobblins

WAP-Tek — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 04:02:11 +0000

the majority of files found in winsxs are "hard" links to elsewhere &
the duplicates are needed for compatability but vista & most programs
read the "destination" files size AS the hard links file size

please google compcln.exe, vsp1cln.exe, fsutil hardlink,
& DISM /online /Cleanup-Image /SpSuperseded

norton vs virus

Anonymous — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 08:50:56 +0000

A virus could have done that for you too ;-)

thank you!!!

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:54:17 +0000

thank you so much! i was close to wiping my laptop and re-installing from scratch!! :)

I am now running the SP3 file

Anonymous — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 19:55:36 +0000

I am now running the SP3 file Compcln.exe. Thank you. I was shocked it was 22 GB and running it reduced it to 18 GB. That is still a massive amount of goo in the system. Ouch!

Well then that's another

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 11:32:16 +0000

Well then that's another couple of bugs, they should use symlinks or soft links instead of hard links as linux does for library versioning, and make Explorer only count the file in it's real location in system32 so you can tell how much space it's actually using.

Also it is only some of the files in winsxs that are links to the real version (probably only the latest), there obviously has to be multiple versions of the same file and they can't be in the same directory as they would have the same name.

clean windows is an oxymoron

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 11:16:54 +0000

18GB is obscene for an OS that doesn't really do much. Winsxs is a stupid solution to a stupid problem.. MS libraries are full of bugs and badly documented. I have seen several outright lies in MSDN which caused hours of wasted development time. No wonder that expensive proprietary software is then full of bugs and nasty badly behaved code which relies on bugs and bad behaviour in the system libraries, which change as soon as a new version is released, leading to wails of 'this update broke my app'.

IF MS could just document their code and make it work like they say it does then applications could just use the latest version of the library and MS wouldn't have to include 20 previous versions just in case someone installs an app which needs the old, broken, functionality.

Much obliged for this

Anonymous — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 02:56:46 +0000

Much obliged for this information