Winsxs is huge… Free up a few Gigabytes with dism

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I was running out of disk space in C: and was unable to install a small software that I needed, so I decided to clean up a bit. For that I like using WinDirStat https://windirstat.info/ which very quickly allows you to find where the big files/folders are. In this case I found that my c:\Windows\winsxs folder was over 12 GB of size. One way to reclaim some of that disk space is to cleanup all files that have been backed up when a Service Pack has been installed. To do that in Windows 7 you can run the following DISM command:

dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded /hidesp

That freed up 4 GB in my machine and now I can move on.

Disclaimer: I only ran this in my Windows 7 machine and it worked great, have not tried it in Server SKUs so run at your own risk.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    July 04, 2012
    Is it full proof solution....as I believe that there are several people on the internet says that it might ruin the entire server if anything goes wrong there in the clean up process
  • Anonymous
    July 05, 2012
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    November 28, 2012
    I had over 11GB in the winsxs folder and after running that command I now show 7.4GB! Thanks for the info!
  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2012
    its not inaccurately saying 1400 .(2 files at 700kb each is 1400kb ')these are two different files  ///not short cuts to the same file
  • Anonymous
    December 11, 2012
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    December 17, 2012
    More information on the command can be found here under the resolution section: support.microsoft.com/.../2592038
  • Anonymous
    January 27, 2013
    Now the link is gone? Very clever and well played MS!
  • Anonymous
    January 27, 2013
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    September 09, 2013
    Check out www.karafilis.net/winsxs-cleanup