Removing WinFS (at your own risk of course)

I was a bit taken back by the memory consumed by the WinHEC build of Longhorn. It turns out WinFS is sucking up around 200mb of RAM. Well, as of right now I'm not planning on learning much about WinFS (nor do I have the resources in a VM to properly take advantage of it), so let's get rid of that sucker. To remove some components, I had to edit the C:\WINDOWS\INF\SYSOC.INF file (do so at your own risk, I'm just kinda winging it here in a VM, so I can easily start over). I had to remove the HIDE keyword from entries to be able to uncheck them in the Add/Remove Windows Components dialog. Once I did that I was able to go into add / remove items, and uncheck WinFS. 200mb of memory almost instantly reclaimed.

Once again, WinFS seems really cool. But I'm not going to be playing with it in a VM, so I decided to get rid of that sucker. Something else that seems to have helped out performance (especially in Explorer) was turning off :preview and filters in folder." You can find this option in the advanced section of the My Computer Properties under performance.

3 Comments

  • Ok, I'll bite. WHy don't you just disable the winfs service and the two or three services that depend on it? Wouldn't that do just as good a job of removing it? And then you don't have to worry about messing with the internals of the system.

  • You know, I disabled the service and the memory stayed high. I didn't spend too much time thinking about it though, and just removed it. I'll probably be throwing this down on a couple of machines at work, and I'll investigate it a bit further.

  • well christ, i reinstalled Longhorn overnight to make sure I wasn't go crazy, and sure enough: i'm going crazy. disabling that sucker actually worked this time.



    this is twice in a week when all i post is something i found useful, only to find out i did way too much work. which in of itself is rewarding to know a better way, but then again pretty freakin' embarrassing to go through way to much work to solve a simple problem.



    sigh.

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