WinSxs Folder consuming enormous disk space

Anonymous

My WinSxs folder under Windows directory is consuming 10GB of disk space. We all know that Windows root folder is the system root directory. What is WinSxs? Is there any work around to clear up the free space from this folder? If it keeps building up with this rate, I can see my primary partition being being full very soon. Is there anything that I can do to get back this disk space?

hrishi

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Anonymous

Hi Hrishz,

I’ve attached a link below that explains the purpose of the WinSxs folder:

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

You can use the Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) Files Removal Tool which has resulted in some people having more free space in the WinSxs folder. The downside is that after doing this you will be unable to uninstall SP1, you should have SP1 installed anyways so if this isn’t a problem proceed with the steps listed below:

1. Click Start

2. In the “Start Search” box type VSP1CLN.exe and then press Enter

3. In the command prompt that opens type “Y” for yes to perform the clean up

Here is a article about this:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc709655.aspx

You can also take a look at another post about this same issue in the forums, link below:

http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vistaperformance/thread/e473cda6-94d5-4e6a-9ce8-97cf876174a0

Hope this helps. : )

If you have any further questions don’t hesitate to ask.

Brian

Microsoft Answers Support Engineer

Visit our Microsoft Answers Feedback Forum and let us know what you think.

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43 additional answers

Anonymous

2009-11-26T00:30:31+00:00
My Acer Portable was supplied with Vista Home Basic on a 32 gig C: Partition Vista setup on a 16 gB Hidden partition and a 32gB D Partition- C: Drive shrank to 1 Gb free space because of WINSXS expanding. I had to reinstall Vista to get space back. You keep telling people to buy a larger drive, not satisfactory but as you won't provide a solution to reduce the size of WINSXS please tell me two things
1. Will WinSXS work the same way with Windows 7 and eat up Hard drive space or have you made it work smarter
2. If I buy a larger drive, how do I copy or port the contents of the existing multi partitioned Drive on to it (I have a 250gB portable USB hard drive at my disposal) Will the current vista on my 80 gB drive regard a larger drive as a new piece of hardware and fail to certify as genuine?
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Anonymous

2009-11-01T22:53:27+00:00

Hi Brian

This would appear to be a carefully crafted non-answer.

I have noted several other Microsoft Support Engineers giving exactly the answer. In response to your "Hope this helps : )" no, it doesn't help your useless response is a complete waste of my time. If the answer is "don't think about trying to have a virtual machine with less than 100 Gigabytes of disk space allocated to it" so that Microsoft doesn't need to address the problem then just say that.

: ) yourself.

Richard
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Anonymous

2009-04-11T07:27:44+00:00

My home OS: Vista x64 Ultimate SP1 Russian

RAM: 4 GB

Disk C: System, Boot

Disk C size: 50 GB

Today 11.04.2009.

Size of WINDOWS folder: 46 GB

Size of WinSxS folder: 30 GB

Lets see to system requirements:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/get/system-requirements.aspx

and what we see:

40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space

After VSP1CLN.EXE:

Size of WINDOWS folder: 46 GB

Size of WinSxS folder: 30 GB

I think that microsoft MUST write in Vista system requirements:

... at least 100 GB of available space

Vista must die!

After home usage, I don't want implement Vista in my organization.

Microsoft, WTF?

Sory for my english...

MCP, MCSA, MCSA: Messaging
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