Guested Account Posted January 8, 2019 Report Share Posted January 8, 2019 (edited) I was searching my hard drives to see if I have a 1984 movie in my collection named Wild Life and no I don't; but the search results found a little video file called Wild Life HD. So I open the folder it's in and then scroll up to the bigger folder that folder is in and it put me into this large folder. What the Heck is all this? Look how many files there are and how much room in my Drive C they are taking up!! 13 GB is a lot of hard drive space!! Can I delete them? I did a disk cleanup and it only deleted about 300 MB and none of them are from this folder. I even followed the instructions here and disk cleanup did not find any Windows Update files to show me to remove. https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/clean-winsxs-folder-to-save-space According to the above article those files are needed for Windows Update and each time Windows Update is ran, more files are added to that folder. But Windows Update only need to the newest files out of that folder according to that article and Disk Cleanup is supposed to be able to single out all the older files in that folder that Windows Update no longer needs to use to do the next Update. Well, Disk Clean up didn't find anything in that folder that could be deleted. There is no bloody way Windows need all those files, all 68,231 of them, just to run the next Windows Update which by the way I have changed to MANUAL years ago because there were reports some of those Windows KB updates were EXE programs taking over PCs constantly showing pop up messages on the screen telling their users to update to Windows 10 and if you didn't, after a few attempts to get you to update, they will lock the PC user out of the OS and install Windows 10 without the permission.. Edited January 8, 2019 by j7wild Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Morph Posted January 8, 2019 Report Share Posted January 8, 2019 Definitely DO NOT delete anything in there. WinSxS is a system folder, and these appear to be 64-bit software components from base installation and updates. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guested Account Posted January 8, 2019 Author Report Share Posted January 8, 2019 But there are so many taking up so much room on my drive!! Happy New Year, Morphie!! I turned 54 Sunday 2 days ago. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Morph Posted January 8, 2019 Report Share Posted January 8, 2019 Happy New Year, J7! And Happy Birthday! ? I know, they can be a pain! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guested Account Posted January 8, 2019 Author Report Share Posted January 8, 2019 (edited) Thank you, Morphie! Typical of Microstupid! Edited January 8, 2019 by j7wild Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tom@LCO Posted January 8, 2019 Report Share Posted January 8, 2019 Get an external Drive for all your movies. I bet you get that 13 gig back. If you need space and just watch movies and browse the web switch to Linux Lite. I see you have Windows 7 and next year it's retired for updates. I put Linux lite on old computers for myself and friends and haven't heard a complaint yet. You can burn a dvd or make a usb stick and boot it live to try. Takes up 1/4 what Windows does. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guested Account Posted January 8, 2019 Author Report Share Posted January 8, 2019 I have an external hard drive connected to my PC. Actually I have 16 of them, all 8 TB. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tom@LCO Posted January 8, 2019 Report Share Posted January 8, 2019 woah.... I thought I had too many lol. You have me beat by a mile. I have quite a few 6 that top at 4 TB and assorted smaller ones and the retired ones. I get paranoid after a few years and back up everything onto new drives and retire the old ones. When I was creating LCO my hard drive crashed and if I didn't have somewhat of a backup on zip 100 disks then I'd have been screwed. In any event it took me two weeks to re-create what I'd lost. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guested Account Posted January 8, 2019 Author Report Share Posted January 8, 2019 Every one of my external hard drive has an identical one for back up and everytime I add or remove something in it, I do it immediately on its identical backup. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tom@LCO Posted January 8, 2019 Report Share Posted January 8, 2019 I saw those I just didn't trust anything over 4 TB at the time. I feel the higher you go the more you have to lose. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guested Account Posted January 8, 2019 Author Report Share Posted January 8, 2019 I only had one of them crashed on me and it was years ago: a 500 GB one. But I took it apart out of the plastic case and plugged it into the tower internally and it's been working fine since as a 2nd internal hard drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tom@LCO Posted January 8, 2019 Report Share Posted January 8, 2019 Recently I had a 3 TB My Book Live wifi drive go on a corrupted update or something. Luckily I backed it up not long before it went. I re-fortmatted it and it works fine so I put the backup onto it for safe keeping. I'm on the fence about getting SSD drives the only ones I have are in my laptops. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mick Posted January 11, 2019 Report Share Posted January 11, 2019 Yeah, like Morph said, don't delete anything in the WinSxS folder. This folder is the broken windows architecture bandaid system. ? There are 100s of slightly different versions of same library file in that directory. There should only be one version of each library file. But over time they broken backwards compatibility. Say some old game program (TR3?) would draw a window on the screen, it would call the drawWindow function in draw library file and it would do the expected operation. But over time Microsoft made changes to how and what the drawWindows does in that file. The changes to these files are for security updates, new versions of windows, new features etc. . . . But these changes can causes your old game program to fail or crash or whatever. SO Microsoft sticks every version of the file in the WinSxS, then for compatibility. This way the old game can load the exact version of the library that existed when it was original released. They made thousands of changes, so there are thousands of files. This help us to run all our old TR games on our WIn10 PCs BTW 13Gig is not much space anymore, SSD are really cheap. Given the backward compatibility is good with Windows, the loss of 0.013% (13/1000) of my 1T drive for these files is nothing. Apple computers have crap backwards compatibility, their programs ran on PowerPC CPUs in Macs; about 2005 they changed to Intel. Your TR3 for 1998 PowerPC Mac would not work on your newer intel CPU Mac. Most of my old ipad apps no longer run on the new ipad OS. But i can run my original 1998 TR III CD in my Windows 10 64bit os with a few patches. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guested Account Posted January 11, 2019 Author Report Share Posted January 11, 2019 I didn't delete any of them. I have plenty of hard drive free space, internally and externally. I just don't like to see crap in them especially the kind that Microsucks like to bloat our hard drives with. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guested Account Posted January 13, 2019 Author Report Share Posted January 13, 2019 I was able to run disk clean up and get it to scan the files in the winsxs folder and when the scan was completed, it told me 5.4 GB of those files could be deleted. I clicked okay and it deleted those files. Reason why the files in the winsxs folder didn't come up in the disk clean up scan the first couple of times is because I had Windows Update disabled under services.msc. That's just poor design! If you don't have Windows Update on, it doesn't detect the folder which is clearly there. Microsucks just want to make everything complicated - just like lawyers - always complicating things that are not supposed to be complicated. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.