How to shrink the windows folder (WinSxS)

How to reduce the size of WinSxS folder (Windows 7):

When you have less space on your disk because you use for example a solid-state drive (SSD) then the growing size of the windows directory will become a challenge for you.

In some cases the windows directory grows up to a size of 30+ gb. Especially the WinSxS folder is known for being a chunk in the directory.

This article explains how to reduce the size of the WinSxS folder.

Windows creates backups while installing a servicepack. In case that the installation fails, windows will just use the created backup to restore the previous version.

These backups are stored in the WinSxS folder. If the Servicepack was installed successfully there is no need to store the backups. In other words you can just delete them without having any issues.

For this purpose open the cmd.exe:

Press the windows button –> search for „cmd“ (without quotes) –>right click on the „cmd.exe“ –> „run as administrator“

Now a small windows appears. Please type: „dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded“ (without quotes).

This process may take a view minutes until its finished.