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Get-alladafluff-out

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#276 antonino61

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Posted 12 October 2021 - 10:45 AM

but my point was to get more and more off windows of what we do not really need.



#277 Wonko the Sane

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Posted 12 October 2021 - 11:39 AM

but my point was to get more and more off windows of what we do not really need.

Sure :), and my point was that instead of posting in a public forum incomprehensible notes, you could scribble them on a (paper or electronic) diary and keep them for yourself, while if the scope is instead that of sharing your experience and achievements, they should be:

1) understandable

2) detailed

3) reproducible

 

:duff:

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#278 antonino61

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Posted 13 October 2021 - 06:23 AM

I'll try my best; the only thing of it is what u find ununderstandable, I find it understandable (the only point I might agree with u on is names, I say whatever and u expect a definite name); what u find undetailed, I find it detailed (probably the poor naming contributes to making a detailed description undetailed); and what u find unreproducible (or irreproducible), I have already reproduced (of course, this too might depend on the poor naming). but I honestly do not think it is difficult to reach or undetailed if I point ppl to \windows\system32\ or system_32 or system 32 (it simply means whatever it appears as, it can only mean that one, because the other 2 which it can be confused with are \windows\system and \windows\syswow64. i.e., not so much of a similarity to label it confusing. Me, I am an empiricist, not a burologist, I go by trial and error if I have nothing else to rely on, which is most of the time if we consider statistics (what u know is infinitely less than what u do not know; it is a fact for everybody). Me I could not think of going anywhere without erring, and I do not thing everybody else proceeds otherwise, I might be much more prone to thinking that some might not like to see how they themselves proceed. anyway, relying on my patience and painstaking availability, I did not get any concrete request for clarification of one point, which I would have taken good care and pleasure to explain. 



#279 antonino61

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Posted 24 November 2021 - 01:46 AM

Another personal record - minimum used space now 2.2gb on my vhd, owing mostly to the following modded files

 they are a bit sloppy and repetitious, also for including bits that woulda been much more appropriate in other files of the win_reduce list. I put them all inside these 2 files for 2 reasons: 1) I had already reduced the vhd according to all other parameters I could (see posts above) so I only needed these latest modifications; 2) keeping them all in 2 files helped me better trace those parts I had to backtrack on on acocunt of the few attempts that had gone wrong. All in All, I kept all functionalities of the previous versions, but I am still unable to get my wife's iphone visible on the drive panels, never mind copy photos and videos. My android phone does show up and work ok, though.

 

 

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#280 alacran

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Posted 24 November 2021 - 04:04 AM

Hi my friend, I will answer you in this topic to not pollute unnecessarily the VHD WIMBOOT topic.

 

About you post:

 

 

sorry, I thought he was interested in my vhd sizes and he once asked me for filelists related to them, not only in terms of vhd smallness, but also in terms of vhd largeness. there are also some software details. if it is not the case now, I will post it in get-alladafluff-out. one day you will pls explain to me why whatever u post is poignant and whatever I post is preposterous, just to satisfy my curiosity, me if I were u, I would check both the file list and folder list I posted for culprits, in order to stand everybody (including u urself) in good stead, but of course it is my humblest opinion. the only difference I can see about the nature of ur posts and that of mine is ur infinitely greater IT knowledge and experience. Anyway I will post it where u said - do not know how to delete it from here, though.

 

 

I will try to answer you:

 

I think we two, as old users of the forum shuld give the example for new users and do not promote the disorder (will all due respec to the forum moderators, and with the only idea in mind of make their work easier), and the best we can do is post our exeriments/experiences into our own topics, as a very recent example:

 

You just saw I had the idea to share my list of portables, and since the begining I commented that will do it in another topic, and I did it this way when posted my list of portables in one of my own topics, but as wimb commented he could get some inspiration from that list, I posted a link to the list into his topic.

 

I usually report all the test made in the new programs versions in the author topic, to let the author know if all is working fine in another environment or if there is an issue or a suggestion to improve the program making some adjustments or some times some additions or programs that could be included, always with the idea to help improve his program, and try to make it in the best clear possible way, understandable even for non advanced users too, that may read the topic latter.

 

But trying as much as possible to do not disturb the main objetive of other people topics. Of course, as a human I'm not perfect and it is very possible sometimes fail to follow this. And I apologize for it.

 

You know I appreciate you as a good friend, and my comment was made in a very friedly way, and with the best intention, and let me tell you, sometimes your rare questions (a little hard to read your post sometimes) make me think, and have helped me to find new ideas or ways to improve a procedure.

 

alacran


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#281 alacran

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Posted 24 November 2021 - 04:20 AM

By the way, It may be good if you take the time to publish your portables list in a way as I did, it makes thing easier for all readers, and I will be the first one in read it, very possibly you are using some programs that may be usefull for me or other readers too.

 

In fact now I can remove several of my portables that are actually included in System_Info, and I will have enough space for new candidates.
I will be waiting for your improved list.

 

alacran


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#282 antonino61

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Posted 24 November 2021 - 08:22 AM

Thanks for ur good intentions, Alacrán, and I am sorry if mine look different even when they are not. It must be my karma. I do appreciate ur acknowledging my being of inspiration, and I wish I could contribute to a well-pruned list of portables - the sysinfo additions we have enjoyed lately have not led to a huge reduction of my portable list, which is variegated, as u will have noticed. My portables are the ones I have given y'all, preceded by F:\, which, wonko permitting, is the "volume" they are on.



#283 alacran

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Posted 24 November 2021 - 09:40 AM

Hey my friend, you posted this:

 

 

here is my portable list

all of them reside in f:\portables\portableapps

Attached Thumbnails

 

post-69650-0-79192100-1637532643_thumb.p

 

post-69650-0-05005100-1637532651_thumb.p

 

 

Do you mean you only use portables from portableapps.com?

 

alacran



#284 antonino61

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Posted 24 November 2021 - 10:29 AM

Most, not all. Anyway, for order's sake, I always see to it that they reside in that folder.

#285 alacran

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Posted 03 December 2021 - 06:49 PM

@ antonino61

 

I have two candidates for deletion:

 

MicrosoftWindows.Client.CBS_* >>> 17.8 MB and ShellExperienceHost_* >>> 25.6 MB.

 

But before doing it, I would like to know if you have some experience (good or bad) if they are deleted.

 

alacran



#286 antonino61

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Posted 03 December 2021 - 07:33 PM

bad one, and wimb along with me. it will ask for password again and will not complete booting even if u enter the right one. if u read above, there is another file to leave alone along with this cbs one. wimb initially attributed the failure to the deletion of some authentication stuff, which I later found out not to be the culprit anyway, the culprit being this one and, wait a sec, I will tell u in a bit. this problem was eventually solved by not deleting all instances of remote procedure call (rpc*.dll).

well, Alacrán, sorry for misremembering it - what I wanted to allude to was a couple of instances of rpc*.dll (remote procedure call) in the file list, whereas u r referring to the folder list. now I can remember exactly why I said bad experience - i remember wimb telling us all not to remove ... still a .cbs file from the file list. u'd better check his custom_file_*.txt u will see a ;\...-.cbs and another ;\ line which tells u not to remove them. see if either is in the .cbs folder u have mentioned here. that is my only caveat in the end, before your deleting it.

 

ur second one must be fine, no prob, I have just deleted it and no issues so far.

 

again, sorry about the initial confusion, but it is about thousands of files, so pls allow for it.



#287 antonino61

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Posted 03 December 2021 - 09:01 PM

I also think we should join our efforts, experiments and attempts into one thread, to avoid confusion and redundance. this way we can try all suggestions of deletion. the same should apply to anyone suggesting we delete anything - only when we have proved these suggestions right or wrong can we be sure we have tried everything. I know it is rather time-consuming, but it is well worth the trouble. Of course, I do not expect any philibustering (preposterous suggestions for wasting our time), but even some instances of brute force so typical of get-alladafluff-out, which, seen in this light, are the result of logical (albeit much less technical) conjectures of the following type: if i do not have edge and internet explorer anymore, why not see if some files related to them and still around on the vhd can be gotten rid of?
so the way I look at is as follows: anyone knows they are not using a certain facility or application and try to get rid of it. if anyone else knows that its absence hinders the use of other facilities or applications, pls say it. a good way to resort to a previous stage before disaster is to get a copy of the vhd we r working on. the real problem is when we think we have safely deleted something until we find out that some application have stopped working on account of our last or second last deletion. me, I also keep a second copy, an "original" copy, someplace else, so that makes 3 instances of the same vhd and the waste of time can be reduced a lot.



#288 alacran

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Posted 03 December 2021 - 11:13 PM

Sorry the info related to my previous question was not clear enought:

 

I am talking of this folders:

  • \Windows\SystemApps\MicrosoftWindows.Client.CBS_* >>> 17.8 MB
  • \Windows\SystemApps\ShellExperienceHost_* >>> 25.6 MB

But just tested this myself, and this are the findings:

 

I deleted both and the VHD booted fine without any issue, but latter I wasn't able to open any of the icons on the right of the task bar: Net, Volume or the Clock, but Configuration was working fine, after restoring \Windows\SystemApps\ShellExperienceHost_* folder, (from a copy of the VHD, made before deletion), all started working fine again, so this takes care to open apps in a window. So we should not delete this folder.

 

But so far the absence of \Windows\SystemApps\MicrosoftWindows.Client.CBS_*  folder hasn't presented any issue.  I'm using a local account and booting as Admin (without any password).  I will continue checking this further and comment back.  But so far it seems safe to delete this folder.

 

 

After fist boot:  Used space = 1.51 GB    Free space = 487 MB    Used Ram = 730 MB    Please see attached photo.

 

alacran

Attached Files


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#289 alacran

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Posted 04 December 2021 - 12:15 AM

JFYI

 

After intensive search I found very little info about \Windows\SystemApps\MicrosoftWindows.Client.CBS_*, it seems the developers of this package do not want to talk about this, but so far I found this is also known as Windows Feature Experience Pack and in this page you can find additional info.

 

But to summarize it is a pack related to apps updates, separated from the main stupid monolitic Mega updates, in fact a regresion to old stile separated updates, like the monthly updates we used to have before Win10, maybe that's why they don't want to comment anything about this subject (as this implies to admit they have been wrong for last 5 or 6 years), so far it only includes just a pair of useless improvements or new useless apps, as you can read in the linked article.

 

So I can conclude there should not be any problem after removing this folder, and our Mini-OS VHD should not lose any critical or basic functions.

 

alacran


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#290 antonino61

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Posted 04 December 2021 - 03:54 AM

so, from \windows, yes  for the deletion of *.cbs, and no for the deletion of \shellexperiencehost (attaboy alacrán), whereas no hindrance for their deletion from \programdata;  I even went on to delete all instances of cbs from a brute swiftsearch session on an offline vhd and the next boot it went looking for SENS indefinitely. I retried the procedure on the same online vhd and it left C:\Windows\System32\ncbservice.dll (which I later discovered to be network connection broker) undeleted: next boot was fine and here I am with no issues SO FAR. I will return on this if need be and, for the time being, do not delete C:\Windows\System32\ncbservice.dll if u wanna boot again, unless u delete the service the way Alacrán has shown us.



#291 antonino61

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Posted 04 December 2021 - 08:14 AM

all in all, this is the trouble and delight of brute force deletion - on the one hand, it may cause catastrophic failure, but on the other, it can lead from the awareness that 1 thing can be deleted to the awareness that 2 (albeit unrelated) things can be deleted, because one thing leads to another - only 37 services. the main thing is to have made 2 copies beforehand.

Another piece of advice is to establish at the very outset what one does, uses or likes as a rule with the pc and stick to it - all the rest may go out. there is no use in keeping the info necessary for the pc to read the content of a dvd or a mobile once or twice a year - an ad-hoc integral version can be used on these rare occasions instead.  



#292 wimb

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Posted 04 December 2021 - 09:34 AM

But so far the absence of \Windows\SystemApps\MicrosoftWindows.Client.CBS_*  folder hasn't presented any issue. 

 

I confirm that \Windows\SystemApps\MicrosoftWindows.Client.CBS_* can be removed without issue.


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#293 alacran

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Posted 04 December 2021 - 10:20 AM

We should not make a seach for *.cbs, as antonino61 did and mentioned on post No. 290, we have to be more specific and instead search for MicrosoftWindows.Client.CBS_*

 

Using swiftsearch I made a search for more instances of MicrosoftWindows.Client.CBS_* and it found this:

 

 

\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\AppRepository\Packages\MicrosoftWindows.Client.CBS_120.2212.31.0_x64__cw5n1h2txyewy\

 

\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\AppRepository\MicrosoftWindows.Client.CBS_120.2212.31.0_x64__cw5n1h2txyewy.xml    47.1 KB (48,269 bytes)

The first one containing:

  1. ActivationStore.dat    256 KB (262,144 bytes)
  2. S-*.pckgdep    6.52 KB (6,684 bytes)

No. 1 Seems to me related to the OS activation data.  Better don't remove it.

No. 2 Seems to me related to the Trusted installer and/or System account on this OS.  Better don't remove it.

 

The *.xml file, once open it, says: Identity Name="MicrosoftWindows.UndockedDevKit"   I don't have a more informed opinion about this, but it is so small that I prefer to don't remove it, there's not a big gain in doing it. So remove it does not pay for any possible potential risk.

 

Just to conclude talking about all other instances of MicrosoftWindows.Client.CBS_* = I do not recommend to remove any of them.

 

alacran


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#294 antonino61

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Posted 04 December 2021 - 08:08 PM

Thank u ever so much for the tips!!!

#295 antonino61

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Posted 06 December 2021 - 06:02 AM

how about placing Clean_All-Full.cmd in the startup folder? me, I went from an offline-mounted lzx'd 2.67gb (free space 839mb) vhd to an online just-booted 2.72gb (free space 771mb, coming down to 751 (wonder how, with a few scraps junctioned to ram, which alacrán dislikes, though, if I remember correctly)) vhd. it seems to have stayed stable and not to have written to disk anymore, SO FAR. I suspect that the size windows reports takes into account the stuff junctioned to ram as well, as I see an albeit slight used/free-space discrepancy. pls correct me if I am wrong. As I was saying, it was achieved by checking what files are written as soon as it boots up by swiftsearch and move folders and files to ram and junction their at-last-achieved nothingness back to c:\. free space still is 751megs.

Alternatively, for those folders that windows, or any other program, for that matter, "might as well not write to", it is even better if one turned them into 0-byte files. this is exactly what I am trying now, and I can tell u that it cannot be done with \windows\system32\logfiles (so this one stays junctioned).



#296 antonino61

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Posted 06 December 2021 - 02:21 PM

Well, one problem I have run into while dealing with these automatically created files and folders is that of ie* occurrences. apparently, u cannot get rid of all of them, unless u r prepared to lose some program's functionality. u need to have some ie*.dlls and ie*exes for everything to work as normal. I will be more detailed about it all, for now I can say that maxthon5 wants iertutil.dll in syswow64 to work properly, which reminds me of wonko's hardcodedness theory - we might as well resort to other browsers and software, but here most things seem to necessarily depend on internet explorer.



#297 antonino61

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Posted 06 December 2021 - 10:37 PM

Anyway, here is the list of my 0-byte files in the vhd:

Attached Files



#298 gbrao

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Posted 16 December 2021 - 12:45 PM

Posting here because WinSxS_reduce was first posted in this thread (by cdob).

 

Later on it was suggested that the original Manifests folder be copied back to the WinSXS folder (after running WinSxS_reduce).

 

I think the folder Fusion also needs to be copied back to the WinSXS folder.

 

I tried WinSxS_reduce on WIndows 11 and Samsung SideSync would not start - VC++ error. I then found that many VC++ files were in

C:\Windows\WinSxS\Fusion.

 

After copying this folder, it worked OK.

 

Just a heads-up for any one facing a similar problem.

 

The folder Fusion was not present when I installed VC++ on Windows 10.

 

File list in Fusion in attached txt file.

Attached Files


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#299 antonino61

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Posted 16 December 2021 - 12:52 PM

Thanks a lot. Even if that old way worked for me, I trust ur experience and think of adding fusion too, if I only knew how to. i cant even find the fusion folder here - do u think it would help preserving the files on ur list right in the winsxs folder?



#300 gbrao

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Posted 16 December 2021 - 01:04 PM

Thanks a lot. Even if that old way worked for me, I trust ur experience and think of adding fusion too, if I only knew how to.

The folder Fusion appears in WinSXS (I think after installing the VC++ runtimes). First time I came across this. I don't know if it is Windows 11 specific.




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