Winsxs manifest folder (windows side by side)

[xstayxtruex]

My Winsxs folder is taking up ~15GB of my system HDD.

Being my C drive is a 37GB Raptor, i need to make enough space as possible.

Everyone says to stay away from it, but its hard to ignore it when you've got nothing but system files on a system HDD and you only have 5.5-6 GB of free space (after restore points and backups have been removed) at any given time.

If anyone knows anything trust worthy that wont put my computer into DLL Hell. I'd love to hear it.

Thanks in advance.

[RejZoR]

Leave Winsxs alone. In Vista/7 you can't even modify that folder without seriously mocking up access rights. Which i again don't recommend.

New systems take up much space because of:
- pagefile (usually same size as total RAM capacity)
- hibernation file (same size as total RAM capacity)
- System restore (which is set slightly more conservative in Win7 by sacrificing number of check points)
- system itself contains all editions, it's just a matter of what your key actually activates

By disabling hibernation feature and disabling pagefile (or lowering it to a fixed value) you'll gain ~8GB of space. You can lower the amount of System Restore available space or disable it all together (not recommended). You'll gain few gigs from that.
But all in all, for ~50 eur you can get 500GB Samsung SpinPoint F3 drive. Why bother and complicate things when the answer is so damn simple. Leave operating system on Raptor and all the other data on SpinPoint F3. Because it's just not worth sacrificing all the above just to gain those few gigs that you'll fill very fast again. And especially not worth messing with Winsxs because no one really knows what's safe to erase there and what's not. You'll just kill your OS and you'll have to reinstall it. Just buy a new HDD. It's really the best thing to do here.
And it doesn't exactly cost a fortune, plus it's very fast.

[temp02]

Follow RejZoR advice and stay away from that folder.
Once I "did" do what you are try to do and got a corrupted OS (most applications wouldn't load).
That folders keeps track of systems DLLs with different versions (for different apps different DDLs), so even if you could remove the *most* of them in the end some apps would not load (and this even includes the Windows "default" ones).

Since the files on that folders are not very diffrent from one another, the best thing you can do is enable NTFS Compression (at least on that folder) so that it takes less "real" hard drive space.

[RejZoR]

The problem is that you can't even use NTFS compression on it. Without again seriously mocking up the access rights. It's possible by changing access rights, but from my experience, it's just not worth it.

[temp02]

Uhm... I found something on the "internetz": WinSxSLite, and by the reports/comments from some people its seems to "do" something...

EDIT: Yup it seems to work once you "install" all the dependencies mentioned in [H]elp.
Still have to check if it does it's job or not...

[xstayxtruex]

ok thanks alot guys.