Free space dramatic decrease ! !

Hi there!

over the past 3 months, my free space has decreased dramatically! i had about 14GB of free space and now it's down to 5.5GB.
During these months i haven't installed anything, the only thing i do is surf the web, update some old programs and download movies which i transfer to an external hard drive.
So i haven't added anything to decrease the free space.

I've noticed that on the user folder, google earth takes some 1.8GB of space.
The folder C:\Windows\winsxs is growing almost every day and now it has reached 9.57GB:eek:

So my question is can how can i free some 8GB safely? Is there any folder that keeps temp files that can be safely removed?

The WinSxS (Windows Side-by-Side) directory cannot be deleted or modified. . Content is added to this directory in response to installing applications, enabling packages in the add-remove-programs UI, and installing Windows Out-of-Band releases. One important note - uninstalling your application or Windows app will not necessarily remove the physical bits from the system. The servicing stack marks the bits as unusable and prevents their use through "normal" means. Files and directories will be removed over time as the servicing system cleans up after itself. Administrators should not, for any reason, take it upon themselves to clean out the directory - doing so may prevent Windows Update and MSI from functioning properly afterwards. Preventing accidental deletion from the directory is accomplished by putting a strong security descriptor on the directory that inherits to its children.

In Windows Vista, the directory %windir%\WinSxS has much stronger protection on it than it did in Windows XP and Server 2003. The owner/group is now a SID named "Trusted Installer", a service SID used to start the TrustedInstaller service. Users other than the trusted installer are granted only generic-read/generic-execute by default. This increased protection ensures that only the trusted installer service is allowed to modify the servicing-related metadata and files.

If you move or delete winsxs directory there are 2 issues. 1. Updates will NOT work on the machine as they are hard coded to the directory in a way that the junction stops. and 2. Vista SP1 wont install if the winsxs dir is moved, but if you move the winsxs folder on vista that already has SP1, it will blue screen as there is a direct link to the winsxs dir as well.
http://blog.tiensivu.com/aaron/arch...in-Windows-XP,-Vista-and-Server-20032008.html

Have you done a system clean-up. Right click on your hard drive (C?) - Properties- Disk Cleanup. This will give you a series of check boxes. Check them all except any error or system reports you may want to keep. Click OK
Norm

Also, drives are cheap now. Spend $50 and you'll gain 250GB of space

thank you for the replies..as i understand it winsxs shouldn't be tweaked in any way..
i have an external hard drive to keep all the movies,files,documents,songs etc but what i'm worried about is that the free space is continually declining..

nikost said:

thank you for the replies..as i understand it winsxs shouldn't be tweaked in any way..
i have an external hard drive to keep all the movies,files,documents,songs etc but what i'm worried about is that the free space is continually declining..

Click to expand...

Right, don't touch it. Did you free up hard drive space as I suggested. Another culprit is system restore. I don't recommend you turn it off. Some people do but thats living dangerously. Check the Tutorials on how to reduce the amount of space it uses. 1+ gig for google is a lot? My Google earth doesn't take up that much space. Are you storing images you don't need? Are there other programs, such as movie converters, storing data?

Norm

i ran disk cleanup and the hibernation file cleaner is 2.2GB.. so i deleted them since i'm not using hibernation mode

i'm still 6GB short but i guess there's nothing i can do about it..
anyway thank you all for you help and the replies

You're welcome