Short tip: clean-up Windows installation

calendar May 19, 2015 · 1 min read · kurztipp  ·
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After a couple of months or years plenty of storage is wasted on Windows systems and sometime it is not possible anymore to free space by using the well-known procedures. Recently I had this issue on a 5 year old system - the following steps did not help anymore:

  • Executuing the Disk Cleanup utility
  • Manual cleaning temporary folders
  • Moving the page file
  • Disabling hibernate

Another possibility is to clean-up the %WINDIR%\winsxs directory. For this procedure the dism utility has been created - manually removing files should be avoided. This folder containns older DLL files and other components. The following command removes unnecessary files and Service Pack backup files:

1dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded /hidesp

In my case this did not free much space as I already removed Service Pack backup files before using the Disk Cleanup utility.

Underneath the Windows directory there is a sub-directory Installer (%WINDIR%\Installer) containing Windows Update packages. After some time this folder also increases heavily - in my case to nearly 20 GB. Even if Microsoft does not recommend deleting these files, they can be moved or deleted to free disk space. Make sure to create a copy of the folder - if bad things happen. 🙂

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