Windowsxs
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Thread: Windowsxs

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Aug 2016
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    Windowsxs

    What ho one and all,

    I have a Dell running W7 that I only use for viewing TV over the internet (either live or catch-up) or playing DVD or USB thumbdrive with whatever film as a mp4 (or whatever.)

    Recently, encountered a problem that I think I have resolved, but in defragging, I found that the 40gb C partition is over 3/4 full. Since I only have W7 and a few programs that are not space hungry, I checked. Found that folder Windowsxs is around 15gb, much larger than the W7 program files.

    Doing a Google search, and it seems that I should neither delete or reduce this folder, but surely there must be a way to reduce its size? And prevent it continually growing?

    Thanks and toodle pip

    Rex

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Jul 1998
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    40 Gigs is pretty small for Win 7. I used to have a similar problem with a small 70 Gig SSD with one of my Win 7 installs and you can't reduce the size of that folder.

    There are other things though... Don't store any media on the drive.. use external storage. Regularly run CCleaner and delete all temp folders and other items it recommends by default and set all browser caches to less than 100 megs. Uninstall any large programs you don't use.

    Two biggies...

    Run Windows cleanup utility and choose "clean up system files". When run the first time it will delete a significant chunk of old Windows updates that have been stored on the drive.. https://www.dummies.com/computers/pc...s-7-and-vista/

    Reduce the space used by Windows System Restore.. https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/wi...ystem-restore/

    I turned system restore off because I use Acronis True Image on all of my computers so it wasn't really necessary and that fixed that big space loss issue. My regularly scheduled full image updates were/are, of course, large and stored on separate/external drives. If you only have USB 2.0 on the computer then that would be a very very slow process and you may not want to do that. I installed a separate, storage only, hard drive in my space challenged, USB 2.0 only computer and used that for my Acronis backups.

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  3. #3
    Join Date
    Aug 2016
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    Thanks for your reply. Done your suggestons and not much difference. W7 clean-up found lots mof things but did not hit Windowsxs at all.

    When I got the computer, partitioned the hdd giving 40 gb for W7, on the basis that it was only going to be used for media stuff, and I did not need to allocat too much space for the OS, as I was not intending to install lots of programs.

    If a clean install of W7 is relative small, why does the program continuly eat into itself? Seems virtually like a virus to me, but what do I know?

    So basically, there is nothing I can do until W7 tells me that the hdd is too small?

    Toodle pip

    Rex

  4. #4
    Join Date
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    Windowsxs can't be reduced in size other than running the updates cleanup that you just did. It will grow continually though as you've seen. Bottom line is 40 Gigs is ultimately just too small. Later versions of Windows don't have the same sxs issues that Win 7 does.

    https://www.howtogeek.com/174705/how...indows-7-or-8/

    Depending on how much RAM you have which determines the size of your pagefile.sys file you could move the paging file to another partition as a rather desperate measure but depending on circumstances you may see a bit of a performance hit. You can also reduce it's size by manually setting the initial page file size to something lower than the default am't of RAM you have. EG if you have 8 GIGS of RAM you could set it to an initial size of 2 and a max of 8 so when Windows boots the page file will only be 2 GIGS in size but could expand if necessary.

    How much RAM do you have installed? That would determine the sizes to set above (in Megabytes not Gigabytes)


    Also if you have hybernation enabled you could disable it to save a good chunk of space, also depending on how much RAM you have installed.

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  5. #5
    Join Date
    Jul 2002
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    You mean sxs wasn't MS's attempt to make Windows sexy?

    Win7 Ult/ 3.40 GHZ Intel Core i5-3570K /ASRock mobo Z77 Pro4 /SSD/ EUFI MS 3400 MHZ/8 GB RAM; Win 7 Ult/Verizon FIOS wired network
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    "The medium is the message." - Marshall McLuhan

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Nov 2018
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    2
    Sorry about no reply; totally unable to log onto Vdr (Too many log-in attempts) Have had to create a new Vdr profile. Bummer!!!

    The W7 computer in question is only used for viewing DVD movies, etc, and some catch-up TV. So it has 4gb RAM. Sufficient for how we use the computer.

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