0

Possible Duplicate:
Why does the /winsxs folder grow so large, and can it be made smaller?

My machine has been running Vista Ultimate 64-Bit for about two years now. ServicePacks SP1 and SP2 are installed, too. The system partition has a size of 55 GB, which should be quite comfortable under normal circumstances, but about 40GB (no typo) are used by the Windows-Folder, especially the subfolder winsxs, which takes about 35 GB. I have already uninstalled as many programs as possible and did run compcln.exe, to reduce it, but this only gained 2-3 GB.

What can I do to clean up without risking system stability? I'm a software developer and this is my daily work environment, which means - I can't risk to get strange side-effects from blindly deleting stuff. - You can maybe deduce some typical usage patterns from this information.

Any suggestions?

Community
  • 1
Simon D.
  • 119

2 Answers2

2

You can't delete this folder. It's the assembly cache.

From TFA:

The Winsxs folder, stores multiple copies of dll's in order to let multiple applications run in Windows without any compatibility problem.

Link is: http://www.winvistaclub.com/f16.html

EDIT: compcln.exe, part of Vista SP2, allows you to remove RTM and SP1 files from the cache, but it will not allow you to roll back to a previous version if you wanted to. The Service Pack Clean-up tool is a replacement of Vsp1cln.exe from Vista SP1 that did much the same thing. See more here.

0

I would suggest you to leave the files there unless you really know what to delete. Winsxs folder is where windows store old version of dll files required by some applications. Your vista won't die if you delete them, but some program will.

xiamx
  • 450