With virtual servers on the rise and quick builds in the Cloud, disk space has again become a premium. SAN’s are not cheap and a basic Windows 2008 R2 server is at least 12GB in size. My server right now is using 18GB to run this site, two others, and 3 mailboxes. And my disk space is limited to 25GB with the inexpensive VPS provider I chose (more on that later). So I again looked into cleaning the Winsxs folder because it’s consuming 7GB by itself.
The important thing to remember about Winsxs is that it’s actually your windows install directory. Most of the folders in C:\Windows are hard linked to that directory. This makes it a folder you really shouldn’t clean out, however there is something you can do to cut it’s size down if you have applied a service pack. Simply run the command below if you installed the service pack through windows updates.
dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded
If you downloaded the service pack and installed locally, then you will need to use this command, and just edit the install directory.
DISM.exe /Image:C:\test\offline /Cleanup-Image /spsuperseded /hidesp