I just uninstalled Anaconda Python because it takes up about 8GB... and I don't remember the last time I used it...

That being said I did sort of use Python last week at work... though even that's rare, just that I had a project used to analyze logs I wrote over a year ago... that needed to be used.

Apparently... that;s not the problem though.... Oh why is the Windows folder so big....

@billgates You should know, you were in charge.. 😁

Jokes aside, there's a lot of growth from years and years of incremental changes, as well as the hangers-on of unused code that nothing uses anymore but must be left for compatibility or just got lost in the codebase. That's my guess, anyway.

@powerfulparadox well no, actually after a major update, the folder usually shrinks to 10GB or less I think. So I think there's a lot of junk especially in the WinSxS folder.

I tried deleting it once though but it screwed up the entire system....

They're probably just storing the update files and previous version then. That's something they do in Windows 10.

@powerfulparadox no that folder is some dependency tree for difference versions of dlls used by different programs or something. The updates I can delete in cleanup... Those are nice... Cuz they're the old Windows folder... Which basically means 20GB freed

@billgates Well, Microsoft hasn't been sane for a long time, so who knows. They could be doing it just to see if anybody notices for all I know. I'm doing a reinstall tomorrow and then fixing my Linux install, and I'll be happy to use my Linux system more frequently. Stuff like this is just needless irritation.

@powerfulparadox well it's just today my C drive dropped below 100GB... so I'm like wtf happened.... It was 130GB a few weeks ago....

@billgates That would be frustrating. My condolences.

@billgates Yeah I feel you, I have a 256GB SSD and I struggle to keep it above 50GBs free :(

C:\Windows\TEMP > nuke everything in it.
I once saw a laptop with 130GB (out of a 250GB ssd) of years-old crap in it, tens of thousands of files. Windows kept complaining about having no storage left (only 1-2 GB empty).
Deleted that, and everything started working smoothly again.

@billgates @endor Definitely that! Last time it happened to me, I mistakenly started a scan on Cheat Engine with a value of 0 for all type. I stopped it as soon as I realised but it still made a 30GB temp file. Took me way too long to actually understand how I "lost" all that space.

@endor I'll check but I thought tmp usually gets deleted by disk cleanup?

All I notice is WinSxS is the largest folder in Windows when I run windirstat