Brian
Thanks for your input! I think that I've read somewhere that there's a difference between different versions of W10 regarding "control over Windows Update" but that's another thread ... ... because I have a feeling that this one has gone on for too long and people are losing interest.

Christer

Christer wrote on Nov 19^th, 2015 at 2:27am:

Actually, I have not lost interest--I am just a poor responder these days    !

So, I wanted to come back to this statement and complete the thought:

NightOwl wrote on Nov 3^rd, 2015 at 4:07pm:

Here's the story:

I had a friend call and say they were getting a warning that they were running out of disk space on their OS partition.

I stopped by and looked at the system and found that there was only about 800 MB of unused space left on their Win7 OS partition. 

To look closer at the where all the used space was, I used this product called SpaceSniffer:

http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/index.html

You don't have to install anything--it runs as a stand alone program--just extract it and it will run from wherever you put the .exe program--I have it on my USB thumb drive.  It shows the entire drive using boxes of different sizes for different directories, sub-directories, and files.  The box size is relative to the amount of space that is being used by the particular item.

(Another good program that does the same is WinDirStat--the standard program is installed on your system:  https://windirstat.info/ .  Or, you can use the portable app version:  http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/windirstat_portable ,   which can be installed on a USB thumb drive also and run from there--that's actually the one I use.)

Well, I found a big unexpected directory of almost 9 GBs:  c:\windows\logs\cbs\  .  I did'nt have time to look closely at what the *cbs* directory was at the time, until I got home--but the OS partition was about 60 GB total and it was almost all used up!

Once at home I found these references:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsserver/en-US/3b0b2bbc-d295-4a...

http://felixyon.blogspot.com/2013/03/mysterious-cab-files-fill-up-temp-folder.ht...

http://superuser.com/questions/803842/why-is-cbs-log-file-size-20-gb

https://community.shavlik.com/thread/448019

These references talk about this problem (i.e. running out of disk space on the OS partition) being related to Windows Update, TrustedInstaller.exe (Windows Module Installer), and I think about installing updates take a longer time to happen.  I initially thought they also talked about high CPU and RAM usage--but, that may have been a reference that I did not bookmark, because I did not see that in the above links when I reviewed them.

And, I had noted that you had said this earlier:

Christer wrote on Oct 21^st, 2015 at 6:54am:


So, I initially thought this problem with the *CBS* directory and its files growing beyond about 0.5 to possibly 1.5 GB at most might relate to your problem(s).  But, now that I can't find any reference to excess RAM and CPU usage--I'm betting that the problem is unrelated to what you have been talking about.

But, you might want to check out the *CBS* directory to see how large it is!  I checked mine and it was only about 700 MB.

Regarding checking directory and file sizes on my friends computer--what I found was that there are two very large directories  c:\window\winsxs (I now call that the *windows sucks* directory) which was about 12 GBs and a second one c:\windows\installer  which was about 5 GBs.  I saw your comment here:

Christer wrote on Oct 21^st, 2015 at 6:54am:

I ran the Disk Cleanup Wizard on my friend's system and it reduced the winsxs directory by about 2 GBs and the installer directory by about 1 GB.

I searched to see if there was any other way to reduce the size of those two directories, or possibly move them to another partition to free up space on the OS partition--but, all the advice I came across said not to mess with them!  Also tried to find if I could move the *hibernation* file (my friend likes to use that feature), but apparently that is not allowed either--dang it!

I have more comments that I want to make regarding other items in this thread (and maybe this post as well), but it will have to wait for a day or 2 or 3.....!

Off topic but this works with Win8 onward....

Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase

http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/how-check-size-and-reclaim-disk-space-wi...

I've been using it for two years. No issues and it certainly reduces C: drive used space.

My OS is 3 years old, Win8 upgraded to Win10. WinSxS folder is 6 GB, Installer folder is 3 GB.

NightOwl

NightOwl wrote on Dec 2^nd, 2015 at 5:33pm:

I downloaded SpaceSniffer (SS) and compared to Windows Explorer, size according to the properties of the folders. Both reported the same sizes but SS sorted in order of size. The CBS-folder was so small that I had to search specifically for it.

Sizes below are before and after running Disk Cleanup Wizard (DCW):

c:\window\installer - before = 4,67 GB - after = 4,67 GB - no difference

c:\windows\logs\cbs - before = 75,7 MB - after = 735 MB - - a lot to log, obviously

c:\windows\winsxs - before = 21,2 GB - after = 11,5 GB - reduction 9,7 GB

Prior to running DCW, it reported that 9,46 GB would be cleared.