But using the Link Shell Extension, you can see how many of the files are not hardlinks…

A quick scan of my relatively clean Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit install, shows around 600MB of “orphaned” files (that is, files that don’t also exist in other folders) in the WinSxS folder, out of 5,5GB reported. This means around 5GB of the files in WinSxS is actually hardlinks to files in other locations in the Windows folder.

This makes more or less sense, since my total Windows directory tree reports 11GB. That is close to 5GB “real” Windows files, plus 5GB hardlinks in WinSxS, plus 0.6GB orphaned files in WinSxS.

If you turn this calculation around, you can make an educated guess about how much waste your WinSxS folder really is:
1. Check the reported size of your Windows folder with all subfolders.
2. Substract the reported size of the WinSxS folder with all subfolders.
3. The remainder is all orphaned files in WinSxS plus all files in the Windows folder that don’t have a hardlink in WinSxS.

Let me be blunt, when I learned Windows 7 also has this system limitation I was finally convinced I need to migrate away from Microsoft and start implementing more Linux systems in my infrastructure.

This folder which can range from a few gigs to 16+ GB may seem innocuous enough to those with 5400 RPM or 7200 RPM HDD that are 100+ GB, but when you have 37GB 10,000 RPM HDD in most of your systems it can create serious problems when you don’t expect such a large foot print for the OS. What makes matters worse is that when you uninstall applications, the DLL “copies” are kept in the winsxs folder, they are NOT removed.

Even if you are creative; managing to create junctions/symbolic links and move the winsxs folder to another drive (not a task for the faint of heart) you will find that you can no longer install windows updates as you will generate error 80070011 because Microsoft will not install updates into a folder junction.

Unfortunately, I see Windows 7 as being a slightly less buggy Vista with some changed/added features, yet is still full of flaws. On the other hand, the Linux methodology is becoming more polished and user friendly despite its limited market share. The reality is that the majority of my client networks will remain XP Pro as long as XP Pro remains available.

Microsoft’s current line up is more geared towards the high school/college aged social networker than it is towards business and productivity. From my view, Vista and Windows 7 are moving too far away from what computers do in the workplace and too much towards what people do in their personal lives. Employers realize this which is why I think Linux will replace many XP systems when XP is no longer available for licensing.

I think that directory is just result of LAZY Coders working at Microsoft!!

Given the argument in this article IF somehow it miscalculates disk space used by WinSxS then this should be true
summing up the size of all folders n files in my C:\ + free disk space should be greater than the total disk size. This matches exactly as my partition size hence making it hard for me to digest what’s written by the Microsoft blogger.

if you ask for a file size sum of either of these areas separately you will end up counting the sizes twice.

Possible problems for space I can see is there you have files in winsxs with a link count of 1 – this means other the original has been removed without cleaning up winsxs, or the original is on a different volume and its created a copy rather than a hard link. Or there was never an original and something is directly referencing winsxs which means there is no way you can know if a file is safe to clean up.

I’ve been looking at the APIs and it should not be too difficult to write a tool that recurses through the file system and keeps a track or which files are hardlinked to which (you can get a link count plus the file ID from the file info struct) – if I get round to writing it I’ll post it somewhere.

I’m still more than tempted to backup older versions elsewhere, and turn the older versions into hard links to the latest version unless there are major version number changes in the library – though this risks breaking software when dll APIs change.