WinSxs Folder consuming enormous disk space

Anonymous
2008-12-24T21:21:38+00:00

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

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Performance and system failures

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Anonymous
2008-12-25T03:50:29+00:00

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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  1. Anonymous
    2012-12-02T09:40:09+00:00

    To continue this, now what about solutions for Windows 8? Non of what was previously suggested work for Windows 8. My WinSxS folder is sitting at 9Gig with minimal installed applications. I'm seriously thinking about reverting back to Windows 7. This all happened because I wanted to install the same VM's on my 128GB SSD as I have on my laptop (win7 though with 128GB SSD) but noticed I am severely lacking more space.

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  2. Anonymous
    2012-04-18T20:56:31+00:00

    I found your response to be unnecessarily rude. I thought that Brian's response was helpful and informative. I too have a VM where I found this large folder, and Brian's informative response was most helpful in helping me resolve an issue that was impacting Hyper-V backups. 

    The next time you decide to post a comment in anger, take a deep breath, walk around the block, or do something to cool off.

    There enough hot heads in the world already, try not to embarrass yourself so readily.

    Peace

    Sometimes, Dude, Microsoft's pat answers are just too frustrating to be borne coolly. And coming on top of the numerous other frustrations that Vista heaped upon an unsuspecting *paying* public, I can well understand, and completely identify with, the man's anger.

    In the circumstances I thought the response was quite *polite*. And unless we use strong and unambiguous language how else is the money machine in Redmond going to know how pi**ed off we are? Especially when the suggested solution is no solution at all and does nothing useful?

    And lastly, just because the posted "solution" worked for you does not mean it is a solution for everyone. Microsoft's kb articles notorious for the inconsistency of their results.

    So, in keeping with the tone of this thread, peace yourself.

    P.S. Your response was something like three years late. Mine, in contrast, is only 5 months behind.

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  3. Anonymous
    2011-09-27T15:10:05+00:00

    Richard,

    I found your response to be unnecessarily rude. I thought that Brian's response was helpful and informative. I too have a VM where I found this large folder, and Brian's informative response was most helpful in helping me resolve an issue that was impacting Hyper-V backups.

    The next time you decide to post a comment in anger, take a deep breath, walk around the block, or do something to cool off.

    There enough hot heads in the world already, try not to embarrass yourself so readily.

    Peace

    Andrew

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  4. Anonymous
    2011-04-24T06:18:37+00:00

    I think it's backing up the dll's of viruses, also, such as the rouge.security virus that nailed me within 5 minutes of trying the IE9 download.

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