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Both, the PendingDeletes and the PendingRenames folder within the windows temp folder are about 1GB in size. Is there any save way to empty or delete those folders?

C:\Windows\WinSxS >10GB C:\Windows\WinSxS\Temp\PendingDeletes 800MB C:\Windows\WinSxS\Temp\PendingRenames 210MB

I have no pending installation. My operating system is Windows8.1 Is there any way to cleanup the WinSxS folder as a whole? I already used the clean-up utility when right clicking the disk. But did not change much!

Thanks in advance

Matthias
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2 Answers2

18

The safe way to clean up WinSxS is with Windows' Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM). Running the following in an elevated CMD prompt should theoretically remove some of the excess baggage:

DISM /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup

However, for that task to complete, TrustedInstaller must be running, which is not set up in Windows 8 by default. To run TrustedInstaller, you may need to first enable TelnetServer, then enter

net start TrustedInstaller

After DISM runs successfully (on my PC, I found that DISM worked only when Windows was started in Safe Mode), you may want to disable TelnetServer and stop TrustedInstaller.

After all this folderol, you may find only a modest reduction in the size of WinSxS. In my case, it was reduced from ~10 GB to ~7 GB. sigh.

[It is a great deal easier to use Janitor to clean up old Linux installations and updates, aka "cruff", but Windows is not Linux.]

DrMoishe Pippik
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I tried running DISM with various flags, and rebooting my computer, and nothing worked. My Temp/PendingDeletes folder was 14 GB and the newest file was from 3 years ago, so I decided to take a sledgehammer to it:

NO WARRANTY, COULD BRICK YOUR PC

  1. Open start menu and search for Terminal (or CMD maybe, I'm using Windows Terminal), right-click and "Run as Administrator".
  2. cd C:\Windows\WinSxS\Temp\PendingDeletes
  3. del '.\*'

This cleaned up the folder for me. So far my PC is still working.

Dan
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