is the new service pack correct this thing or not? i'm thinking of buying a new comp with a vista and advice is needed

Not really, but instead it increases the size of the SXS folder as I was almost to 6Gb when I installed the SP1, might be over 6 now because of the recent patches that came out. Of course your should be smaller since yours will come pre-installed, however, because of Win SXS function to help with making software compatibility it will always increase as you install more and more software and what not.

As for your question Inhuman it is hard to say really, you could have more then that but depending what you have installed, and you do some deep cleaning, then you might want to get another hard drive ready as you slowly run out of room and what not. Of course as the patches start rolling out for vista on a monthly basis they will be one of the primary reasons that your Win SXS gets larger.

In regards to SxS:

I looked at this feature in-depth and see the application for it; however, this doesn't exactly discourage broken or actually fixing the source of the problem (that I see, anyway). Dynamic Link Libraries should be programmed to be backwards-compatible and not so that a new version of XYZ.dll will break functionality in programs that rely on a previous version, much like how Microsoft did with DirectX. Maybe I'm just being another just-want-it-to-work user and not taking into effect the difficulty of engineering DLLs in this way, but wouldn't it make sense?

(For those of you who don't know what SxS is, it stands for Side-By-Side, a Microsoft "innovation" where installations of programs can have their own DLL files as opposed to sharing them. The great thing about it is that you avoid losing program functionality when installing and overwriting old DLL versions with new ones - because either your previous programs can't use the new DLL for some reason or is only programmed to work with an older version. The bad thing is that Vista will allow redundant installing of multiple instances of the same DLL - different versions to accomodate different programs - and this apparently will eat up hard drive space like crazy as more and more programs are installed on the Vista machine. This feature is also available to XP and other platforms through virtualization software... although I'm wondering why the heck anyone would WANT this. Anyone who wants to correct me on this, please do so... I don't even have Vista and I'm talking smack about it. )

Just because we have the technology and hard drive space is becoming cheaper doesn't mean that we can go crazy with lazy coding and lazy techniques to temporarily fix problems...

This post has been edited by rayzoredge: Apr 11 2008, 07:00 PM

Well from what I surmize about the Winsxs folder is that folder is used to fix the compatibility problem, along with using the new search indexing as well. Of course I did a little searching just to see if I could move that WinSXS folder to a new location, or rather to another hard drive, and to answer that question no you can't or you will not get updates, and if you have installed SP1 you will blue screen of death the computer. So I might have to do a back up of that computer one day, and move everything to the bigger hard drive, and at 250 gigs that is going to take forever .

Yea, I was already planning on getting am external hard drive this summer, so I can put all my music and software on it. Is there any specific reason why MS decided to do this other than to screw over the consumer?

wow great that i found this thread...i too notice that lately my drive is getting smaller and smaller.
Will to remove those "junks" in the folder to free up space.
THANKS!!!

As I mentioned in my first post, Inhuman, it has to do with being able to install different versions of the soft and not run into any compatibility issues. sometimes programs require older versions of files in order to run, if you remember in XP and you uninstall a program and a pop message saying something along the lines that a file existed for this program and if you uninstall it, other program might not work? It may not be the exact words but you might have an idea what I am getting at, but that is what vista is doing and so you won't get that error through vista, I believe.

Check out this link and it might give a better explanation about the winsxs folder