Windows 10: Windows 10 System Files Growing

I haven't a need yet to compress the Windows Folder but have noticed that Win10 File Explorer tends to open .zip/compressed files faster than the former Windows Explorer.

 

That is a separate thing really - the OS decompresses files it needs on the fly although they could certainly could have improved it. 7-zip is about 20% faster making the same zip file than Windows so there is certainly scope to improve things under the covers and perhaps they have.

It is all a balance - whether the extra CPU time to decompress files is more (or less) than the reduction of time reading less data from disk.

The new compression algorithms (xpressXk) are far more efficient (especially at decompression) than the old NTFS compression and generally most machines are IO not CPU bound. Perhaps if you had extremely fast storage and an extremely weak CPU then compression would be detrimental but I've never found it to be true in real life and I have some hardware with pretty ancient CPUs..

 

Very true, I also find it strange. I've looked up other articles about using a CompactOS: there isn't much consistency among them. I find your information much more reasonable especially with your experience. Thank you.

Since it's happening on two different systems is also interesting: would manuals be available for each one of the netbooks to determine what the setup and expectations are for each system?
I suspect it would be good for us to know what Tree Size came up with.
Would Speccy include helpful information on what's going on?

 

I think Microsoft's intention for OEM Windows 10 machines was always that they shouldn't have the traditional large Recovery partition with a complete backup image from when the machine was new. Instead the system should be able to reconstruct itself from WinSxS files, with the advantage that it would be using patched files to reconstruct.

There's an interesting snippet here:
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/...isk-footprint/
which is that the Reset function ignores the most recent 30 days worth of updates when doing this.

As you say this isn't directly related to whether or not Compact OS is used although I don't fully have my head around how that works, and whether it ends up running directly from the WinSxS files - I think that was more how Windows 8.1 WIMBoot worked though.

 

It is more or less the same as wimboot, but main difference is the wimboot files on the old 8.1+Bing were held in a separate partition so you effectively had two copies of winsxs. The wimboot folder doubled up as a recovery partition as well. Many people found to their horror when they deleted the c. 5 GB Recovery partition, they had destroyed Windows!


It now works directly on the version in C drive. Up side is less space needed, down side is more chance theoretically of infecting winsxs folders on C drive with a virus. However, the folders are well protected and virus infections on winsxs are rare.