New
#11
That is correct. It is also correct for expansion of WINSXS. Long-term (like more than 4 years) expansion typically leads to some sort of corruption and subsequent obscure & hard to resolve problems.
Well I wonder about that. MS does issue WINSXS cleanup routines after each major OS update. These actually work, but take out only the modules that were used by the previous OS and that were replaced by the update. Obviously doing this prevents reverting to the non-updated version of the OS, but who wants to do that anyway?
If that technique can work for the OS itself, why can't it be expanded/enhanced to work for application installs too? Most major apps use the infamous WIndows Installer package, so this would be the perfect place to implement such a capability.
This whole WINSXS issue got started as a means to eliminate the old "DLL Hell" problem in Win3.x. That, in turn, resulted from the concept of sharing DLL's as a means of saving hard disk space. But now disk space is both inexpensive and plentiful. So a simple fix would be to change Windows Installer to install everything in the application's own directories.
The same concept could work for Registry entries. Remember the old INI files? These worked just fine, but for some reason someone at MS thought they needed to be replaced with something "better." Is there anyone who really believes the Registry is better?
Exactly correct. Which is why I plan on scheduling 2 days to get my 10 installation working correctly. That's a ridiculous amount of time I know, but my past experience suggests it's what it will take. I recognize that this is partly my fault - my system has 2 SSD's and 2 HDD's and I have used Junction Links to reposition various files to non-standard (i.e., off my SSD boot drive) locations. Nevertheless, 2 days to do a clean OS install is ludicrous.