WinSXS cleanup (Free up space on your hdd/ssd)

[shakerist]

Hey everyone, I recently got an ssd to use as a boot drive and so I am quite wary of how my disk is being used and today I came across a folder named WinSXS (C:\Windows\winsxs) and this occupied a space of 10gb so after a bit of research I came across a command which cleaned my winsxs folder by 4gb, it deletes the backups that win 7 sp1 creates when installing so when you run this command you will not be able to uninstall sp1. So run command prompt in administrator and cut and paste this command :
DISM /online /Cleanup-Image /SpSuperseded

Windows vista sp1 users can run a utility named VSP1CLN, run then cut and paste VSP1CLN click enter.
Vista sp2 users have a similar tool named COMPCLN.EXE

Hope this helps

[jim]

As I understand it, explorer and other programs tend to misreport the size of Winsxs - it's built to store different versions of DLL files to avoid "DLL hell" situations. Many of the files aren't actually there, and are effectively symlinks rather than actual files on disk.

At the very least, it's a bit more complicated than just clearing out junk. If that's just SP1 backups then I'm sure it won't cause any particular damage, but it's probably not as bad as it first appears.

[Singh400]

I wouldn't touch WinSXS with a barge pole. It's used to keep older DLLs files side by side for compatibility reasons.

[kalniel]

SP1 backups can be deleted through the inbuilt Windows Disk Cleanup tool I think - far safer.

[GoNz0]

thats commands the same thing from what i can see.