Cleaning WinSxS. How do I clean a WinSxS folder?

Not so long ago, most of the home PCs were equipped with hard disks, the volumes of which were extremely far from epic. In particular, it was often possible to meet a car with a 30 GB hard drive, or even less.

Of course, at that time the struggle was almost for every free megabyte on the hard drive. Years passed, the sizes of data carriers gradually grew. Today it is not uncommon for a home PC with one or two terabytes on board, and therefore there is almost no concern about the lack of free space for users.

WinSxS folder

However, this does not apply to all users. For example, some of them do not give up the cleanup of WinSxS. What is this abbreviation? This is the name of the system folder, whose dimensions often cause discussion in computer forums.

Advanced users are haunted by the fact that this malicious directory has an unpleasant property to constantly grow. And does this, even if you do not install any programs on your computer!

It happens that the size of this "miracle folder" is over a few dozen GB. In this case, inexperienced users begin to reinstall the system, sinning on the bred viruses, and the minds of their more well-read colleagues again begin to completely absorb the proper cleaning of WinSxS.

What is it for?

Here it is necessary to stop and explain the purpose of the directory, which is located at the following address: C: \ Windows \ winsxs. In this service folder, Windows operating systems store old versions of some of their files, which, if necessary, can be quickly restored from nonexistence.

Why is it constantly increasing?

Many inexperienced users have a persistent misconception that this folder starts to grab huge chunks of free disk space immediately after installing the system itself. This is far from the case.

To begin with, the size specified in the properties of the catalog does not have much in common with the actual state of affairs. Keep in mind that many files that are supposedly in this directory are actually located in general in other places. Their volume is taken into account only because of "hard" links in Explorer.

Immediately warn especially enterprising citizens: do not turn on the display of hidden files, and then manually delete all the contents from the folder. Yes, a bit of free space you really will win, but only your joy will be very short. The system will quickly react to such mockery, and therefore very soon all work on the computer will be overshadowed by constant failures and departures on the blue screen.

There are several safe ways by which cleaning WinSxS can be performed completely without consequences. In this article we will consider them.

Windows 7

Until recently, OS users from Microsoft could not even imagine that many important functions would finally be implemented directly into the system. Everything changed after the appearance of the "patches" SP1 on the "seven".

More recently, on October 8, 2013, Microsoft pleased its users with the update KB2852386, which added to the system the possibility of regular cleaning of this directory. If you have automatic jump and install updates, then it probably is in your system.

We start the cleaning procedure

Even the most inexperienced user can cope with this. First, open the My Computer window. Then, right-click on the system drive, select "Properties" from the pop-up menu, and then go to the "General" tab in the dialog box that appears.

At the bottom is the "Disk Cleanup" button, which should be pressed. The utility window will run, which will take some time to analyze the amount of disk space that can be released after all operations. To familiarize you with the results of these analyzes, another dialog box will open.

You should be interested in the button "Clear system files", which is located just below the list of all system resources that can be cleaned. Click on it, confirm your actions by clicking on "OK" in the appeared window of UAC.

Again, the analysis starts, after which another window will reappear. In it, you can finally poke the "Ok" button, after which the WinSxS wipe will be completed.

Another way

There is another method, in which you will need to use the command line emulator running as administrator. How to do it?

First, click on the "Start" button, search the "Find" menu in the opened menu. In the field, type the word CMD, then in the right part of the working window find the file with the same name. Click the PCM on it, and then select "Run as administrator" in the pop-up menu that appears.

What to do next?

A terminal window opens with elevated privileges. Copy and paste the cleanmgr command there, press Enter. The program for cleaning the WinSxS folder will appear again, in the drop-down list, select the system disk, then click on the "OK" button. After this, perform the same operation as described in the first cleaning method.

General recommendations

We recommend that you clear all the check boxes, except for the item "Clean Windows Updates". Once again, check everything, then click on the "OK" button. After that, the WinSxS folder will be cleared. Cleaning Windows 7 assumes that after doing this, you must send the system to reboot.

After that, you can again climb into "My Computer" and estimate how much space was freed. As we have already said, in particularly neglected cases this difference can be very, very significant.

On the advantages of Windows 8 / 8.1, or Automation cleaning

Despite all the criticism that hit the "Eight" immediately after its release, it had important advantages from the very beginning. So, the possibility of removing old updates was always there, so users of new systems from Microsoft do not need to clean up the WinSxS folder. Windows 8 in this regard is fully automated, so you do not even have to configure anything.

In the "Seven" something similar to configure is also quite realistic. In order for you to have automatic cleaning of the WinSxS folder, Windows 7 needs to be run from under the administrator's entry. In addition, you will need to enter the command-line terminal emulator with elevated privileges.

We have already described this technology in detail above. When the terminal window appears before you, copy the following line to it: schtasks / Create / TN CleanupWinSxS / RL Highest / SC monthly / TR "cleanmgr / sagerun: 88". After that, you can press Enter.

From now on in the first days of each month the folder will be automatically cleaned from any garbage. If you want to adjust the execution time, click on the "Start" button, find the "Run" field there, then enter the taskschd.msc command there.

The "Windows Task Scheduler" opens in which you can correct all the necessary parameters for deleting old files from WinSxS. Cleaning Windows 8 / 8.1 is not needed! Once again, we remind that irrelevant updates are removed from there automatically.

So how much is this cleaning justified?

Again, it is accepted that any hard disk cleaning is an operation that is useful by definition. This is far from the case. Especially it concerns deleting files from the WinSxS folder. Clearing Windows 7 for beginners often ends up in the fact that their system completely loses the last remnants of stability, after which something to do at the computer becomes absolutely impossible.

We have already mentioned that in this directory old versions of many files are stored. Which ones specifically? It's simple. The system "stores" there old updates and system files that were changed as a result of their installation.

It's easy to assume that in the event that a patch is problematic, you can easily roll back the system to a state where everything was still working fine. If the repository of these files is completely cleaned, it will not be possible to do this. Accordingly, you either have to wait for an official decision from Microsoft, or reinstall the system.

In both cases, you are wasting your time and money. Given that terabytes of information can be stored on modern hard disks, such a zealous struggle for crumbs of free space loses its meaning.

Before deleting files from WinSxS (cleaning up Windows 2008 and other server systems is even more responsible) double and three times make sure that all components of the system work perfectly, there are no crashes and crashes caused by "patchy" patches and updates.

In particular, relatively recently users of even completely legal systems from Microsoft encountered the fact that the new update caused the inability to launch almost all applications that were installed on your computer.

Even if you finally decided on the need for cleaning, be sure to wait at least a couple of weeks after the last release of Microsoft patches. In this case, at least you will have confidence in the normal operation of the system.