happy bday windows download integrator gives me "remote host hotfix.celestial.info could not be resolved" when i click mcrip updates any idea why? something wrong on my end?
Hi Alpawaves, Using WDI R3.4 to perform a fresh download of McRip updates (e.g Win7 SP1 x86) takes couple of hours now, prior direct downloading via the servers were much faster. Any chance to speed up the download ? Thanks.
I don't know what kind of issues you have but I 've just tested it again and had full download speed. Also it is useless to change the code of the downloader in order to increase the connections. Too many connections per IP will be automatically blocked by the server firewall. Because the server then thinks it is a kind of a ddos attack. My download took 15 minutes, so I guess there is something wrong on your side.
Not sure if this is the right place for this question but I will ask it anyway. By removing superseded updates am I reducing the size of the winsxs folder? Mine is already at 9.4 gb with no superseded updates installed. I've read numerous articles online but I don't know if there is a solution out there to reduce the size of that sucker.
You could remove the backup folder in winsxs, but you would not be able to remove any installed updates after deleting the backup folder.
It is true that WinSxS folder sucks, size-wise (Assembly folder somewhat too) but as much as I wanted to slim it down over the years, I have never been able to find any method to reduce WinSxS in a safe way. I really think it cannot be done without eventual side-effects. I've even tried using vLite (with -extreme switch) and made some images with severely reduced WinSxS (about 500mb left of it). But after I was working off an install based on one of these images I got strange stability problems, although I can't be completely sure it was the WinSxS reduction causing that.
Problem with the hardlinks and 'deceptive' folder/file sizes is that the deployment tools (sysprep, dism, imagex) also count the hardlinks, so if you sysprep and capture an image, the WinSxS is still not actually reduced, just compressed. It would have been nice if the hardlinks could be discounted somehow, but I think this is simply not possible. So either way the image grows big due to large WinSxS size, but that is something original images by MS are prone to as well (at least to what extent necessary). I do think if you have quite specific uses for a certain system, you could make images with WinSxS reduced and have a reliable system, even if somewhat crippled in the sense of not being able to uninstall updates. The inability to uninstall updates is not unlike what the old Vista clean up tool(s) were able to do (vsp1cln.exe and later compcln.exe) in that those basically made SP's and updates uninstallable so the backup files could be removed. Those were not included with Win7 anymore but Disk Cleanup will let you remove SP leftovers and so does Dism for offline images, but that only applies to Win7 when you have installed SP1 on top of an SP0 image, which most of us are not using. Personally I do use master Win7 images based on installs of Win7 SP0 with SP1 installed in VM that are sysprep'd and captured. The Win7 SP1 images by MS are not as clean as they should be, and they are larger than my SP0-SP1 images. Even now, on my latest images which have IE10 integrated (which normally adds about 150-200mb to an image) the install.wim is about the same size as the original Win7 SP1 install.wim. Win8 has some more options for Dism as well as the Disk Cleanup tool than Win7 does, but Server has even more options with removing of feature roles. I really wish MS would make Windows even more modular (modularity was a pronounced goal from Vista on) and give us the tools to make lite images using MS' own tools, but I don't see it happening any time soon.