Windows 2008 what is winsxs folder

Any advice would be much appreciated. If you have desktop experience installed run disk cleanup then click cleanup system files, this will do it for you, or there is option 2. I am also trying to open the start component cleanup but when I get to the "windows" category in task scheduler there is no category for servicing i do not see the category for servicing. I have heard that the winsxs folder is very important and I don't want to foul anything up anymore than I have already.

The operation Completed successfully". As I would expect you not to, service packs are rare these days and once applied are usually from pre-bundled media.

Nah that's a little above my skillset right now. Its a pretty old server that should have been replaced a few years ago,. I have about 4 servers that I am currently trying to find space for, the command seems to be working on one right now and two of them displayed the output I just mentioned up top. On the bright side, one of the servers now has 25 Gb's of free space. Thanks you soo much for all your help I will try to ask one of the other techs at work if they have any other suggestions and I will continue to plug away.

To continue this discussion, please ask a new question. This is expected as we need to run Disk Cleanup in order for this to take effect. It also does not require a reboot to install the hotfix. When installing Desktop Experience, it does require additional features. Just like the Windows 7 cleanup, mileage will vary. Also like Windows 7, the actual cleanup occurs during the next reboot.

After the reboot, taking a look at the WinSxS directory, it has shrunk to the following:. Can I get a cheer? So maybe it is a bit much to expect IT admins to cheer, but can I get an appreciative grunt? The script certainly beats the alternative of doing this all manually. The script will cleanup not only previous Windows Update files as well as Service Pack files.

The script can be run from any directory on the server. It has two parameters: LogPath and a switch called NoReboot. LogPath will allow the user to specify a log location or if none is specified, by default, the script will create a log in the same directory from which the script was executed. NoReboot allows the user to suppress reboots, but will require manual reboots by an administrator.

Note : Make sure to check the log file to verify the process completed successfully and to verify there is no manual interaction required. If the script has completed successfully, the log will end with CleanMgr complete. The script has several phases, using a registry key to keep track of progress. After initial run, it inserts itself as a scheduled task, which runs as local system.

The final phase removes the task. Depending on pending reboots, etc, we have found that this phase may generate a few reboots. Do not be concerned if the server reboots a few times. If you have installed the Desktop Experience feature and thus have the Disk Cleanup utility, you can select the following option to do the same thing:.

If you haven't done it before, it is certain to free up some space. What does that mean? Well, it means that this functionality is already built into a later operating system. In this case, that operating system is Windows Server R2.

Not only do we have several mechanisms to automatically cleanup previous versions of Windows Update files like this update does, we even have the ability to more accurately determine the size of the component store aka the WinSxS directory. The command to accurately determine the size of the component store on Windows Server R2 is as follows:. Running this command analyzes the component store to determine the size and whether cleanup is recommended. Without these update files, you may not be able to recover some of the system files that got corrupted for some reason.

Next of Windows. Microsoft Announces Windows July 15, Please enter your comment! Please enter your name here. The WinSxS directory has grown in size over time. Moreover, its size is not limited by anything although in practice the size of the WinSxS folder in Windows 10 rarely exceeds GB. But keep in mind that most file managers including File Explorer show a slightly larger WinSxS folder size than it takes on disk.

The fact is that the WinSxS directory contains a large number of hard links symbolic links to system files in other folders. File managers, when calculating the size of the WinSxS folder, take into account the size of files referenced by hard links, but this is not correct. The fastest and easiest way to clear the Windows Component Store the WinSxS folder is to optimize the storage with the command:.

In my example, this reduced the size of the WinSxS folder by 2. To clean up old versions of components, run:. After you finish cleaning up the component store using DISM, check how much disk space has been freed. This task runs in the background and automatically removes component versions older than 30 days that have been superseded by newer files.

You can start this task manually like this:. In a previous article , we covered the concept of Features on Demand on Windows, which allows to remove binary files of the unused roles from the WinSxS folder. If you display the list of all on-demand features available in Windows, you will see that the component status has changed to Disabled with Payload Removed.

Thus, Windows allows to significantly reduce the size of the WinSxS folder by removing the unused components from the disk.

The only thing is that this cleanup method suits only for the advanced users, who are familiar with the Windows 10 features and their purpose. As you can see, in our example the size of the WinSxS folder after the compression has reduced from 9.

Not bad, especially for a small-sized SSD-drive. These commands can either be run separately then it is much easier to track the results of each of them or used in a single script file.