Windows 7 - winsxs folder

I was recently cleaning up an installation of Windows 7 on a laptop roughly 3 years old, doing some re-partioning on the hard drive, and doing some system backup imaging - and I realised that the Windows 7 installation on the C: drive was taking up far more space than it should have been.

After raking around for a while I found that one folder - C:\Windows\winsxs - was well over 10GB in size.

Digging around on the internet revealed that this folder in Windows 7 has a habit of accumulating all kinds of stuff that doesn`t need to there.

As far as I can see, this also applies to Server 2012, but it doesn`t apply to Windows 8 and Windows 8.1, as they include a mechanism for self cleaning.

I wasn`t aware of this, but back in 2013, Microsoft produced a patch available through Windows Update which allows administrators to clean out this folder - according to some websites, Microsoft actually back-ported the Windows 8 / 8.1 mechanism to Windows 7, but I am not sure if it does self cleaning on Windows 7.

It is KB 2852386, and is listed within the optional updates - I think it can also be directly downloaded from the Microsoft website.

Once it is installed, it adds some functionality to the Disc Cleanup tool, as it adds an option to do "Windows Update Cleanup" - though note that you have to run Disc Cleanup as administrator, or you will not see the "Windows Update Cleanup" option.

After running Disc Cleanup, do a restart, and go have a teabreak whilst Windows does lots of stuff to itself, and eventually you will be able to log in again.

On this laptop, it said I could free up 10.6 Gb of space on the C: drive, and I did indeed gain the 10 Gb that the Disk Cleanup tool had forecast.

Now here I have a slight problem, in that I am not sure whether all this gain came from the winsxs folder - the winsxs folder reduced down to 8.4 Gb, and I think it started at around 10 Gb, so that doesn`t account for all the reduction.

It could be that Windows Explorer was telling fibbies about the original size of the winsxs folder because it was over 10 Gb, or it could be that the rest may have come from the "Service Pack Backup Files" option, but at this point I don`t know.

On another Windows 7 laptop that was away out of date on its updates I gained some 3.4 Gb of space - the winsxs folder was reduced from 11.8 Gb down to 8.4 Gb, so all the reduction came from the winsxs folder.

On a rather old Dell desktop machine with a tiny hard drive running 32 bit Windows 7 Pro, the KB 2852386 update was already installed - the Windows Update Cleanup option said I could gain some 1.39 Gb - this was spot on, and the winsxs folder reduced from 7.2 Gb down to 5.77 Gb, so again, a very useful gain in disc space on such a small hard drive, which all came from the winsxs folder.

The fact that I got this reduction by running Disk Cleanup manually suggests that KB 2852386 on Windows 7 is not self cleaning.

On a Windows 8.1 laptop, the winsxs folder was 13.1 Gb, and the "Windows Update Cleanup" option only offered to reduce it by 184 Mb, which perhaps confirms that on Windows 8.1, the Windows Update Cleanup facility is indeed self-cleaning.

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