reducing windows size

[Tom McDonald]

I upgraded from XP Pro to Vista RC2. I was looking on my drive and noticed
that the windows folder is 9GB. Are there any files or subfolders that can
be safely removed in order to reduce the size of this? One of the subfolders
called winsxs is 3GB with 4984 subfolders and from what I understand we
aren't supposed to remove anything from there. That leaves 6GB still. The
windows temp file is empty.

 

[Christian Dreiner]

The folder winsxs exists on my system, which is a result of a clean install.
It contains numerous folders and files with a size of about 3.2 GB. As I
didn`t upgrade, it doesn`t seem to be a good idea to remove these
(sub-)folders.

 

[Guest]

I think you are going to find that VISTA is a large operating system
(particularly Ultimate). Disk space is cheap.

 

[David J. Craig]

I have noticed that Ultimate installed on a blank hard drive will use about
15GB including the pagefile and hibernation file in a system with 2GB of
memory - the minimum useful amount. I think more of the cabs are retained
to help with adding new options and recovery, but I am not sure about this.
I just never looked and can't believe the OS has increased that much in
size.

 

[Guest]

Are you guys taking in to consideration the contents of the folder
"windows.old". This folder can be quite large and, assuming you have
retrieved any files (images/documents, game stats) you need from this folder,
it can be safely deleted.
Windows creates the folder during and upgrade or a clean install. If you for
any reason uninstall and re-install Windows, another folder will be created
on the second install named windows.old.000...a third re-install
"windows.old.001" and so on. All these folders can be responsible for a lot
of wasteland and can be safely deleted.

tac

 

[Guest]

I must add that if you did a clean install of Vista over XP (on the same
partition) you might need the windows.old folder to boot into XP.

tac

 

[Tom McDonald]

I did an upgrade from XP but there is no windows.old folder anywhere. The
closest I could find was a hidden folder called $WINDOWS.~Q with 848MB in
it.

 

[Guest]

Wel now Tom, that puzzles me. This windows.old folder holds many of your
files from your previous os. I allowed Vista to reformat and do a clean
install on the same drive I had XP. Vista created a folder named windows.old.
I then uninstalled Vista (driver problems) and reinstalled, and a folder
named windows.old.000 was created. Then, once more (more minor problems), I
uninstalled and re-installed Vista and a folder named windows.old.001 was
created. All 3 folders held a total of 50 gigs of data.

Look again Tom. If you can't find this folder, perhaps an installation
upgrade does not create a windows.old.

Cheers!