12 February 2013

Clean up Winsxs folder on Windows 2008 R2 SP1

Starting from Service Pack 1, Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7 finally has a built-in tool to reduce the size of the Windows Side-by-Side DLL repository and free up some GBs on your server storage. This tool is DISM.exe.

The procedure is the following:

Install Windows Service Pack 1 then ...

Start and elevated command prompt (run 'CMD' as administrator) and ...

Run the DISM command, which replaces the old VSP1CLN and COMPCLN we used on previous Windows versions:

DISM.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /spsuperseded

Wait 10 minutes before the task completes ( it ends with “Service Pack Cleanup operation completed. The operation completed successfully”)

Normally you should have been able to reduce the Winsxs folder size by 1 or maybe 2 GBs, sometimes more. Saved space may vary a lot.

Just know that after using DISM you will not be able to uninstall the Service Pack 1 anymore.

Let's have a look at the used switches for DISM.exe:

The /online switch tells DISM to work on the running OS installation
The /spsuperseded option removes the backup files created during installation.


Optionally you could use the /hidesp option which will remove SP1 (KB976932) from the “Installed Updates” section of Programs and Features, to ensure that users do not try to uninstall the Service Pack.

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