If you then click or tap the Clean up System Files button, you see a more detailed list that includes various kinds of system files - thumbnails, archived error reports, memory dumps. Right now, in Windows 7, if you right-click on your C: drive, choose Properties, then click or tap the Disk Cleanup button, you see a summary of what files Windows can clean up - temporary files, Recycle bin, log files, and such.
#Windows update cleanup windows 7#
Windows 7 hasn't had a Service Pack since March 2011, and in the interim all of those generations-old backups have accumulated in the WinSxS folder. The Windows Update Cleanup routine (as it's called) only runs as part of the Windows 7 Service Pack installer. When you installed Win7 Service Pack 1, the installer included the option to delete all of the old, obsolete WinSxS files, and if you chose to cut the bloat then, you only have detritus from that point forward. The WinSxS folder isn't supposed to bloat like a C: drive puffer fish, but it does. Unfortunately, you can't just delete the folder, as many of the items in the folder can be crucial to getting your system back up and running if a system file gets corrupted or compromised, or you roll back a Windows patch. I have one Win7 machine with 8GB of files in WinSxS and another with more than 10GB. On most Windows 7 machines, the WinSxS folder gets huge. So looked at from that perspective, the WinSxS folder is really the entirety of the whole OS, referred to as a "flat" in down-level operating systems.
#Windows update cleanup full#
There is only one instance (or full data copy) of each version of each file in the OS, and that instance is located in the WinSxS folder. WinSxS was introduced in Vista and lives on through Windows 8.1. On my workhorse Win7 machine, I got back 3.2GB (yes, gigabytes) of Windows bloat on my C: drive.īehind the scenes, the WinSxS folder - also known as the Windows' Side-by-Side component store - holds every single version of every single operating system file that's ever graced your computer. Now a new feature installed in KB 2852386 lets you delete a whole lot of festering garbage. Until yesterday, those old multigenerationally obsolete files just sat in the WinSxS folder. That way, if you want to roll back a patch, Windows Update can pull out a previous version of your machine's programs and settings, then restore them properly.
When Microsoft patches Windows, it sticks the obsolete versions of earlier files and their settings in the WinSxS folder - typically C:\Windows\WinSxS.
Think of the WinSxS folder as a Windows elephants' graveyard.
0 kommentar(er)
