I found myself in need of reinstalling Windows 7 and thought it would be “fun” to see just how much Windows Updates increases the size of a Windows 7 system. As an early adopter of SSDs this bloat has been quite painful to deal with (my Dell M1330 has 64 GB total). The problem stems from the design of Windows 7 backwards compatibility, and the software update system.
The update system keeps around a copy of every patch. Be very careful if you want to delete this copy. An overzealous delete can leave your system in an odd state. Noticed that winsxs folder taking up so much space? That is a copy of system components from prior editions of Windows so you can run things not ready for Windows 7. Not everything under C:\windows is as it seems – some of the files aren’t “real” but instead links to the real file. The space a folder takes up in explorer may not be the space it takes up on disk. Still, disk space has gone somewhere and that’s what I want to measure.
This first image is after installing Windows 7. I could have used a Windows 7 disc with SP1 included, but I wanted to see just how the patched added up over the years. To be safe, I unplugged the network cable so no updates could be applied during install. The drive reports 28.1 GB used. Before you freak out in the comments that I have done something horribly wrong know that I have 12 GB of RAM installed. The price of awesome means Windows created a 12 GB swap file and a 9 GB hibernation file. Windows 7 is taking up about 7.1 GB not counting these files. For the test, I left these in place.
The next step is to install just the Windows Updates marked Important – no optional updates, and no driver updates.
After many, many, MANY reboots and “check for updates” cycles, Windows finally reported no Important updates were available. Total used space was now 37.8 GB, a growth of 9.7 GB, more than Windows 7 itself! Installing the optional IE9 and Security Essentials updates took the total to 38.4 GB.
Hopefully the Windows 8 team got around to fixing this issue going forward. I dream of the day I won’t fear running out of space because I applied a security update!
Posted By Mike On Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Filed under microsoft |
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