Windows folder taking more than 30GB space

Hello guys,

I have a problem with my Windows 7 folder. It is constantly getting bigger, and by now it's about 33GB.
I checked it with WinDirStat and it showed, that biggest folders are Installer (12GB) and winsxs (9.3GB)

Tried running Disk Cleanup, but after running it as an administrator, it doesn't even show me the option "Windows update cleanup", which could help me a lot. I have the update KB2852386, tried to reinstall it, but this didn't help. Also tried running cleanup through cmd, but after showing all the options, it didn't actually clean old updates.

As I understand, the problem is about OS not being able to delete it's outdated files, am I right?
I'm using 64GB SSD drive, and windows is already taking about 60% of it's space.

Thanks for any help

UmbraDei said:

Tried running Disk Cleanup, but after running it as an administrator, it doesn't even show me the option "Windows update cleanup", which could help me a lot.

When you ran Disk Cleanup, after it scans C it presents the disk cleanup window showing you the various categories of detritus it can delete.

In the lower-left corner of that window, did you see a button labeled "clean up system files"? If you push that, it should then present the additional items relating to Windows updates that are eligible for removal. From this point forward, I believe you won't see that button again, as the Windows Update Cleanup category will now always be presented on the original dialog window.

So, did you not notice that button? Or is it not there at all (implying you've already enabled that feature previously), and you do see the Windows Update Cleanup category listed but there is 0 storage related to it that can be deleted?

dsperber said:

UmbraDei said:

Tried running Disk Cleanup, but after running it as an administrator, it doesn't even show me the option "Windows update cleanup", which could help me a lot.

When you ran Disk Cleanup, after it scans C it presents the disk cleanup window showing you the various categories of detritus it can delete.

In the lower-left corner of that window, did you see a button labeled "clean up system files"? If you push that, it should then present the additional items relating to Windows updates that are eligible for removal. From this point forward, I believe you won't see that button again, as the Windows Update Cleanup category will now always be presented on the original dialog window.

So, did you not notice that button? Or is it not there at all (implying you've already enabled that feature previously), and you do see the Windows Update Cleanup category listed but there is 0 storage related to it that can be deleted?

Thanks for answer,

Running Disk Cleanup as an administrator automatically scans system files, so yes, I've tried that.

Also I found something different. I used WICleanup to delete old files from Installer folder, and it saved me 9GB of space. No side effects were found, so I suppose this worked well.

Today a new update was installed on my computer, and after that I ran Disk Cleanup and found that "windows uptade cleanup" piece with ~45MB of data. By this I now understood two things:
1) "Windows update cleanup" section doesn't appear if there is nothing to delete.
2) It is not windows updates that clogged winsxs folder. And I'm curious what does that.