Alright so I went to go view a file on another one of my drives when I noticed that the meter showing how full C: is was red.  I looked at it and it said there was 2GBs free on it.  So I go in and I check which folders/files are taking up the most space.  I find one called winsxs.  It's over 9GBs.  I know what it is and what it is used for.  I'm just wondering if I absolutely need it or if I can get rid of it to free up a lot of space.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa374224.aspx

I already know what it's for, but I can't find anywhere in there it telling me if it's absolutely needed.

It does say "If the required assembly is not found, side-by-side then searches for a private assembly installed in a folder of the application's directory structure." So I'm not sure if that means I can get rid of it or not though.

DO NOT DELETE THIS FOLDER.

The winsxs (Windows Side-by-Side) folder is a system folder. It would not be a good thing to delete this folder.

You can read more on the folder here:

http://blog.tiensivu.com/aaron/archives/1306-Demy...rver-20032008.html

Well then does anyone have any idea what it could be taking up so much space?  My whole Windows folder is 21GBs all together.  I haven't downloaded anything to C: if it could be avoided, I only installed small apps to C:.

Alright, well, I know it wasn't the best thing to do, but I just went into the properties and compressed all of the folders, then Nile told me a couple other things I could do to free up some space so now I've got 14GBs free.