Any Developments Regarding WinSxS?

A while back I had resided to the conclusion that nothing can be done to safely remove excess baggage from the WinSxS folder. I know that Windows 7 and 8 allow for this somewhat with Update Cleanup.

Recently, has anything emerged that would allow a Vista user to remove duplicates of components that have been updated or not even installed? I understand that many of the files have hard links from other folders, and need to be there, but I'm sure not all of it needs to be.

Nope - there's nothing in Vista akin to the DeepClean in Windows 7 SP1.
Assuming you've got SP2 installed, all you can do is remove the backups using normal Disks Cleanup.

Just yanking out files without modifying registry entries accordingly WILL definitely cause problems - not least you won't be able to tell in an SFC scan what's deliberate, and what's not. You're also very likely to run into problems with Windows Updates failing for a variety of reasons.

With the size of most disks, there's really no need to prune the system in this way anyhow - so it's best left alone.

NoelDP said:

With the size of most disks, there's really no need to prune the system in this way anyhow - so it's best left alone.

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See, just because disks are gargantuan now, doesn't mean I've forgotten the value of a gigabyte. I still want an OS to be lean and efficient. So I think that's a piddle poor way of forgetting about the problem.

I wonder if it would be possible to use the cleanmgr.exe app from Windows 7 or 8 on Vista, and running the "Update Cleanup"?
(Of course I'd prefer to see if someone else has done it first.)

The size of any folder is irrelevant to the speed of the OS. It's that simple!

NoelDP said:

The size of any folder is irrelevant to the speed of the OS. It's that simple!

Click to expand...

That's not necessarily true. Besides, this wasn't about speed solely. Some users want a tidy and lean house. At one time that was a promoted concept. I don't give up on that just because we now have oodles of gigabytes to throw away. Now we have more data left to chance to corrupt, more to defragment, and more for Windows to keep track of. So there are definitely inefficiencies.

Two other things: what do you say to those who have higher performance SSDs or SCSI drives that are smaller? They're just too pricey to go get a larger one. Secondly, if it weren't an issue in the least bit whatsoever, why would Microsoft include an Update Cleanup utility in Windows 7 and 8?

Everyone's advice is "Just use Disk Cleanup and leave WinSxS alone". But heck, even disk cleanup will only clear a couple gigabytes at best. I am sure if we were able to eradicate the redundant update contents from WinSxS, we could get way more than that back. The point is, WinSxS is an inefficient system, and that's no less the case because we have terabyte sized drives now.