Reduce The Size Of WinSxS Folder

Few of my friends had told that their WinSxS folder has grown from less than 1GB initially to more than  5GB. The whole system size is 7.5GB.

This wont be a big concern if you have a huge hard disk space. But it will be the other way when you are running out of space in your system disk. The question is, can this folder be deleted?

But, deleting the folder is not an option, And never do this. Most files in this folder are no real folders, they are hardlinks which are mapped to the destination folders like C:\Windows\system32 or C:\Program files.

This applies to Windows 7 too. Read more about it here:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/archive/2008/09/17/what-is-the-winsxs-directory-in-windows-2008-and-windows-vista-and-why-is-it-so-large.aspx

The Windows Side by Side folder (WinSXS) stores shared assemblies for the roles, features and programs of your Windows Installation.

A 5GB WinSXS folder can considered to be normal on a Windows Vista / Windows Server 2008 Full Installation.

You can run this command if you have Windows 7 SP1 installed and want to reduce (not remove) the size of this folder significantly. Note that, we have not tested this in Windows Vista.

open an elevated DOS prompt and run (command prompt with administration rights):

DISM /online /Cleanup-Image /SpSuperseded