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
    2010-04-05T14:11:07+00:00

    I can't seem to reteave most of my novel, in Microsoft Documents, called UP the Downside. Please help me restore my documents

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  2. Anonymous
    2010-07-28T06:21:46+00:00

    <Removed>

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  3. Anonymous
    2010-08-03T14:42:30+00:00

    Based on this and other posts warning about relocating or removing the winsxs folder I will be recommending to users with this issue to get a new computer or get a much bigger HDD to reinstall VISTA on in order to actually be able to use the hardware they currently own. Judging from our sales agent computers a regular winsxs folder is now running anywhere between 10-15GB on a machine that hasn't installed more than a few pieces of software (on mine it was 27GB, it's now running Linux, writing this on a Windows 7 machine that I hope will remain viable for longer than the VISTA machines).

    If someone has a way to trim this folder that actually works (most of our agents are on SP2, the tool above does nothing, but then it didn't work on the SP1 machine I tried it on either.) I would very much appreciate it, paying for a new machine or new HDD

    • system reinstall because of a "feature" gone haywire isn't making my managers or our agents happy at all.

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  4. 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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