Are you cleaning up your Winsxs folder (in Windows)?

Hi, are you worrying from increase size of C drive, and you tried to delete files and folder from multiple places but still not able to get that much free space!!!

Check size of size of following folder :

C:\Windows\winsxs\

where C drive is where OS installed.

Winsxs is the folder where windows keep all downloaded updated for your windows machine, so that you can revert (uninstall) in case required. With the time, size of this folder will become in GBs (for my case it was 15 GB). You can not simply delete or remove these files.

As of now you have very limited way to recover some of the storage (for Windows 7 SP1 onwards), however from Windows 8 there is inbuilt feature that automatically cleans the update files after 30 days.

How to clean Winsxs folder in Windows 7 :

• Run Disk Cleanup with Administrator privilege.
• Select Disk C (where your OS installed).

• Let it scan drive.

 

• Then select following items to clean windows updates (you can select Service Pack Backup Files also). Remember once you clean these files you will not be able to uninstall service pack and updates.

 

• Click ok and it will start cleaning up.

 

• Disk Cleanup will finish and exit.
• By default it will not ask to restart the system, but when you restart you system then Windows will configure Windows updates on shutdown and Clean up on startup. Clean up may take some time depend upon how much data it needs to clean.

In windows 8 and up Windows automatically clean up old updates after 30 days (from install) giving you option of 30 days to uninstall a update in case some issue occurred, but if you want you can use above procedure to manually clean up the update files.

After cleanup you will get a good amount of disk space back. ☺