So, I’ve been using Vista quite happily for a fair while now. All the doomsayers complaining about how it would use so much more resources were wrong – provided your turn off the transparent borders on windows it still runs just the same (it seems to me) as XP. I guess I’ve always said to friends that it’s alright – I wouldn’t pay to upgrade to it (it doesn’t seem to offer much), but if I was buying a new PC, I’d be okay with it. The only problem I had doing just that was with blackhole detection in the new TCP/IP stack, and that was… exotic.

However, I think I’ve just found my first big gripe. Performing standard system maintenance on my desktop, which is used pretty much exclusively as a VM host, I noticed that my primary drive was using 40Gb. That seemed rather high for Vista, Office ’07, SharePoint Designer and Adobe Reader. Naturally, I broke out Treesize:

So, 28% of my drive is being taken up by the winsxs folder. What the hell is that? Continue reading “WinSxS folder – WTF?” →