17GB in winsxs folder help to reduce please

[Angelo Dinoto]

With 17GB in my winsxs folder I have tried the administrator command prompt by entering :dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded

but got a few error messages one was like 87 and another one
then
I entered suggested command [from:http://www.microsoftpro.nl/2011/07/...dows-7-sp1-windows-2008-windows-2008-r2-sp1/]
in the command prompt:
Takeown /f %windir%\winsxs\ManifestCache\*
Icacls %windir%\winsxs\ManifestCache\* /GRANT administrators:F
Del /q %windir%\winsxs\ManifestCache\*

and this took out my Control Panel [hahaha wow]

so I did a System Restore and got my control panel back.

then I toyed w/the idea of deleting previous restore points and saving the most recent one.
Then I wondered about unchecking the Archiving and Indexing boxes for that : winsxs folder.

And then I found this site when I was pondering about CCleaner, and heard some experts here denouncing it w/admirable opinions based on experience.
So I think that I have found the right people to give a clear answer on this problem.
Thanks for your time and expertise... I bow down to you all.

 

[madcratebuilder]

Read THIS.

 

[LMiller7]

The apparent size of the winsxs folder is deceptive. As mentioned in the article linked to above, the system is using hard links. Hard links are a feature that allows a single copy of a file to appear in multiple folders. This saves considerable disk space but it does make determination of disk usage more difficult. However the disk usage of hard links is reported it will give misleading results for some purposes.

You will find various articles on the Internet suggesting ways to reduce the storage requirements of the winsxs folder but this is not recommended. This will lead to serious and difficult to resolve issues.

 

[Angelo Dinoto]

there-in is the conundrum

on the one hand a solution is offered as in the one above :"Read This"
and then in the same breath another opinion is to NOT do it.

HELP MR. WIZARD..........!!!

Is there no clear answer to this popular problem?

 

[whs]

If you touch winsxs, you will brick your system. So leave it alone.

winsxs, which is not really a folder but a kind of directory, grows each time you install a new program. It is the repository for e.g. .dlls that come with programs. But those are not deleted when you uninstall the program. That is in the nature of .dlls which are 'common' subroutines and can be used by any process in the system. And the uninstaller just does not know which processes may use them since they were installed.

The only way to reduce winsxs is to reinstall the system and to refrain from installing programs. The winsxs for a fresh installation will be around 5GB. But a winsxs of 15GB is not unusual - I would call it slightly above average. Mine is 10GB.

 

[Angelo Dinoto]

winsxs

Ok that sounds clear enough.
So those folks are using the dism administrator command prompt; what are they ending up with?
They proclaim that they have decreased their load by so many GB but have they lost functionality of certain programs?
Thanks for your response.

 

[gooroo72]

Hi!
I was trying to reduce my 16,7GB winsxs-folder as well, and tried some of the well-known methods:

1. In an elevated cmd-prompt "cleanmgr /sageset:11", choose what you want to get rid of, and then run that with "cleanmgr /sagerun:11". No dice, I can't remember if I got an error or not when executing the run, but nevertheless, I got no results.

2. I uninstalled and reinstalled my KB2852386 ("Advanced cleanmgr"), to no avail.

3. In an elevated cmd-prompt "DISM /online /Cleanup-Image /SpSuperseded" No dice, got an error.

Then I saw a post where someone said that he didn't have enough space to run these commands, and decided to give it a try. I had 6GB of free space to begin with, and luckily I had 8GB of unallocated space adjacent to my system partition, so this was a breeze (Win+r diskmgmt.msc).

So now I had 14GB of free space, and I decided to try option #3 first. Success. At least the command ran through, and reported success in deleting backups created during the installation of the Service Pack. I also can report 2,5GB of gained total free space in C:\, but the winsxs folder has shrunk from 16,7GB to 11,6GB. I'll have to investigate later why I didn't gain 5GB of free space, but this seems very nice for now. Hmm, it seems my C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\CBSPersist_xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.log is now over 2GB, might have to delete this soon =). C:\Windows\Temp contains 250MB of crap, so that's already pretty close to the original 5,1GB shrinkage of the winsxs folder. Oh well, I had already given up on this, so these results are all just a bonus.

Next I tried the Advanced Clean manager (see option #1), but although the command went through without any errors, it didn't significantly reduce the size of my winsxs folder.

So all in all, I'm convinced that the lack of working space was the reason why I wasn't successful at first in shrinking the winsxs folder. Should you need to clear more free space in your system partition to run these commands to free up some more space (logical, so logical), you might consider moving your pagefile to another partition if you have one, or reducing the size of the pagefile (if you have lots of RAM, you could disable the pagefile alltogether at least to accomplish the task at hand), and disabling hibernation (google is your friend). Also, using a program like CCleaner might prove very helpful in freeing up some space to get options #1 and #3 to work. Btw, relocating the hiberfil.sys to another drive/partition might be as easy as creating a partition on the desired drive with the Type ID 0x84 (hibernate). This probably requires a third party program, unless you're savvy with Windows' diskpart. Good luck!

 

[RoWin7]

None of the 3 methods work for me.

I'm not short of space, but I have a winsys with over 87,000 files. The built-in disk cleaner removed only 640 MB. I know the total size is inflatedl, but isn't it still big enough to slow down malware scans and file searches? I ran DISM++, and it gave me an error message regarding winsxs files, but cleaned up a few other minor folders.