Discussion on:

Reduce the size of the WinSxS folder with vsp1cln.exe and compcln.exe

what tool do we use to clean up with XP SP3?

Are there any such utilities for Win XP and Win 7.

[empathetic] yay, it reduced my winsxs folder from 16gb to 13gb

my winsxs folder is 5.81 gigs currently how do you clean up on 7

Could you please indicate if to your knowledge there is such an utility for 2008 Server (SP1)?
thanks

Great article, but I can't seem to find a utility for Server 2008. Does anyone know of one?

The WinSxS directory on our 2008 SP1 server is almost 10GB, the total Windows directory size is about 16GB, and the partition is only 20GB. We tried installing SP2, but it requires at least 5GB of free space to install. 20GB is well within MS requirements for a 2008 installation.

20GB partition + 16GB Windows Directory + 10GB WinSxS Directory + 5GB Free Space Needed = SCREWED!

As with all blogs, comments, explanations about this folder, nothing explains how to clean up this folder for W2k8...everything is in regards to Vista...what about Windows 7...

Win2k8 Std SP2 on our server which led us to this post. There is a CompCln.exe in System32. We had a WinSxS folder of 7.1GB and after running the exe it's down to 5.5GB. Not ideal, but a start - this could be due to the fact that the server is a temporary slash and burn and the build is 6002 - I assume, like Vista, this is SP2 Beta.

This model is horrid. Firstly, in Windows Server 2008 the required hard disk size is 10GB, with a recommended 40GB drive in the Official Microsoft System requirements. I have many Windows 2008 servers. Due to security controls and best practices, we separate out different things to different partitions, and rarely do we budget a large amount of space for the boot partition. So we opted simply to use the recommended settings of 40GB.

Had I known of this issue prior to installation I would have budgeted 150GB or so per server. Now I have over 100 local/remote servers with boot partitions that contain 10-15GB of unusable space (or duplicate space, however you want to explain it) that counts against the boot partitions of the drives. This is really unacceptable. 30% of my partition space is taken up with winsxs folders.

But what is worse than that even is the addition it puts on backup/restore operations. In order to do a full system backup and not exclude this folder (because what does it mean if we do exclude it?) we are adding 1-1.5 TB to our backup requirements. Storage is cheap, but time isn't, and that extra processing time is a large net loss in the big scheme of things. Extremely poor design and implementation my Microsoft. EXTREMELY POOR!

Here's the command to use for Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7:

dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded