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

2011-03-19T08:16:21+00:00

This is a bunch of **** this is just a scam to get u to spend more money, so i get a bigger drive so what happens when winsxs fills up that, am I supposed to have 20 networked just to have space just windows because of this.
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Anonymous

2010-09-17T21:48:17+00:00

After over a year of using Windows 7 and having almost none to maybe few issues at times, I can say that it has been a good experience with this OS. WinSXS takes up less than 5GB of disk space as of today. I would continue to say that Windows 7 does happen to have worked like a charm.

hrishi
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Anonymous

2010-08-03T22:40:07+00:00

Explaining the purpose doesn't help my disappearing hard disk space My Vista installation is on a hidden partition, not on a DVD

Please can you tell me what Microsoft's Official Procedure is to move all partitions of an existing installation on a laptop to a new drive. If I buy a bigger hard drive, can you tell me how to copy the hidden partition on to a new larger drive. Will vista see the larger hard drive as a significant hardware variation over the original laptop spec and invalidate itself?
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Anonymous

2010-08-03T22:33:13+00:00

OK so you have move to Windows 7 but is WINSXS in 7 expanding rapidly like it did in Vista? If so then then it won't be working like a charm in the future
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