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

2013-03-27T13:40:28+00:00

Try running this command from an elevated command prompt. It will clean up service pack installations and uninstall files. It cleaned 5Gb out of my winsxs folder that was 13Gb.

dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /spsuperseded
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Anonymous

2013-04-02T20:20:33+00:00

There is no DISM command on my Vista PC.
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Anonymous

2013-04-30T19:47:52+00:00

What Microsoft needs to do is clarify that the "Minimum System Requirements" of Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2005, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2012, etc. include 40GB+ of disk space on the System drive.

Microsoft needs to modify it's installer for Server 2012 and Windows 8 to warn the user if they attempt to install Windows onto a drive with less than 40GB+ of free space. They also need to contact VMWare, Xen, and other VM vendors to have them insert a warning if a user tries to create a Windows VM with less than a 40GB System drive.

Can we get some guidance on what the maximum size of a winsxs folder CAN be? Can it grow beyond 40GB? I've seen reports of 100GB+.

Basically, I want to know what size to set my System drive such that I can guarentee that I'll never run out of space due to winsxs growth. I don't care if that number's 40 Gigabytes or 100 Gigabytes or 16 Terabytes. i just want to know how to configure my VMs.
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Anonymous

2013-05-01T02:40:02+00:00

My mother's WinSxs folder is now over 60GB making her computer effectively inoperable. Having joined two forums regarding this problem and cannot see any workable solution apart from ripping out Windows and reformatting her computer with Linux.

Personally I would never, ever purchase anything with a Microsoft operating system again as it is just not worth the risk.
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