Can I Delete The Winsxs Folder Windows 7' title='Can I Delete The Winsxs Folder Windows 7' />How to Maximize Space on your SSD Hard Drive in Windows 7 using Symbolic Links. Update, April 1. 7 2. If you move your winsxs folder to another drive, importantcritical Windows Updates will fail with error code 8. Windows Update wont work with junctioned files, it requires hardlinks to the actual location of the data. There was a workaround for this in Windows Vista, but stopped working as of SP1. You can still move the folder to save space, but wont be able to run any more updates Update, July 6 2. Heres a handy article that explains the winsxs folder in detail, for those of you who just want to understand whyIf youre anything like me, you want to run the latest greatest programs on the newest operating systems available and the worst thing you can do is sit and stare at loading screens. Your time is too importantOne of the best ways get blazing fast performance from your computer is to run your OS from an SSD hard drive. But, while they may be fast, lets face it theyre definitely not the biggest hard drives in the world. Because 5. 00. GB drives are so inexpensive nowadays, the latest greatest programs and operating systems all seem to assume everybody has tons of extra space. But what if youre installing them onto an SSD hard drive Do you really have 1. GB to waste on a collection of restore points, previous updates, and cache files for 7 languages you dont even speakThere is a new folder full of installers located at CProgramDataPackage Cache. I believe this is from Visual Studio 2012 RC. Can I delete these gigabytes of data. While programs like CCleaner are very helpful, deleting cache and temporary files are only going to free up so much space. No, its time for drastic measuresToday, I freed up over 1. GB of space on my SSD hard drive without losing a single file. How to use clean up the WinSxS directory on SBS 20 R2 using the Disk Cleanup Wizard. Title says it mostly. My winsxs folder is currently taking up 12Gb of space. As I have windows installed on a 128Gb SSD this is taking up valuable space, with windows. I run a remotely hosted virtual Server with Windows 2008 Server for a client. Initially, it had 10 GB of space. During the course of a few weeks during which. Move the Users folder in Windows 10, Windows 8 and Windows 7 Leigh. Can this method also be used to move the huge winsxs folder from the SSD. Deleting files from the Windows Sidebyside WinSxS folder is a bad idea. But, you can shrink the WinSxS folder with vsp1cln. Can I move windows sidebyside folder win. Need to delete winsxs folder for windows 7 installation solved Kid needs a HD upgrade for STEAM. Before you go off and tell me that WinSxS is important to my OSs functionality. I had a Windows 7 RC installation, which I sort of wrecked and I had to. How to Delete Protected System Fonts in Windows 7. You may have various reasons for wanting to delete the fonts on your computer. You may prefer free software, or. Heres how I did it The Investigation. This week, my Limited Edition copy of Crysis 2 arrived. It was a no brainer which drive I wanted to install it on my Corsair SSD. When I saw the system requirements, though at least 9 GB of free space  I was a bit surprised to see I only had 3. GB leftWhat the heck Where did all my space goWith the help of Tree. Size Free, I was quickly able to identify where all my free space went see the program in action here. The first culprit was a huge 5. GB folder named winsxs which sat in the Windows directory. Looking through it, I found a collection folders with scary names and locked permissions. The first thing I did was search for delete winsxs on Google and found a ton of pages which almost unanimously told me to leave it alone. Come on, really I thought. Ive only been using Windows 7 for 3 months. What happens when the winsxs folder hits 2. GB What do I do uninstall the programs I need to run my businessThe Solution. Eventually, I came upon a forum discussion which told me exactly how to remove it. WARNING Proceed at your own risk. Incorrectly performing the following procedure may cause irreversible damage to your OS. It is highly recommended to backup your system before proceeding. Below is the procedure You will need two utilities Pend. Moves and Move. File. Place them in WindowsSystem. Procedure 1. In Windows Explorer navigate to the WindowsWin. SXS directory. Right click the directory to bring up the quick menu and select Properties. Click the Security tab to view the security properties. You will need to assign the Administrator user account ownership of the directory and then grant the Administrators group Full Access. Open an administrator command prompt, and create a dummy directory. Execute mkdir c windowswinsxs. Next, create a junction like a Symbolic link for Vista. Execute mklink J c windowswinsxs. Now delete the winsxs. Execute rmdir c windowswinsxs. Now we will use Move. File to schedule renaming of the Win. SXS directory at reboot. This is the magic that will give us control over the directory. From the administrator command prompt, execute movefile c windowswinsxs c windowswinsxs. As you can see, this is renaming the Win. Sx. S directory before Vista can get a lock. From the command prompt, run movefile c windowswinsxs. This puts a winsxs directory back as far as Vista is concerned, so everything doesnt collapse in a heap. From the command prompt, run pendmoves. It will show the two pending moves youve entered above, with NO ERRORS. If it all looks good, REBOOTNote from Jody at this point, when I rebooted my machine, I was a bit discouraged by the resulting blue screen. After a bit of confusion, I entered a command prompt from Startup Repair and put everything back to the way it was before I started. I then repeated steps 1 8, being extra careful this time. Success9. On reboot the critical renamesmoves will execute, and the Win. Sx. S directory will be unlocked and able to be moved in the next steps. Open an administrator command prompt, and execute dir c windowswinsxs. If you performed the previous steps correctly, youll see a Win. Windows Vista Dutch Iso Download. Sx. S. moved directory and the Win. Sx. S junction. If it did not work, repeat the above steps. Our next step is to relocate the Win. SXS directory and amend the junction. Using Windows Explorer, COPY the entire Win. Sx. S. moved directory to a Windows directory on another partition or drive. When the copy is finished, rename the new directory from Win. Sx. S. moved to Win. Sx. S. 1. 3. Go to an administrator command prompt and execute rmdir c windowswinsxs. Then, execute mklink J c windowswinsxs d windowswinsxs. To be sure everything is happy, in Windows Explorer browse to c windowswinsxs. You will see all of the files. Even though they are actually on your other partition or drive1. Reboot. 17. After reboot, you should be able to delete c windowswinsxs. FINALLY liberate all that disk space. Whew Now take a bow. This process can also be applied to the Windows Updates directory. When you download Windows Updates etc., the files get placed into C WindowsSoftware. Distribution, and this will quickly become huge. It is easier though stop the Automatic Update service, move directory, create junction, restart service, DONE The Permissions. As it turned out, step 1. Delete. Though I was able to copy the folder to a different drive without hassle, deleting them would be another exciting episode of setting file and folder permissions. Take Ownership is a great way to set permissions for files, but the right click option  disappears once you have more than 1. There were over 1. I was gonna do them 1. I needed a recursive script that would go through every single folder and set permissions. I found it here Note this script refers to a file which can be downloaded here. To get it to work, I typed the following from a command prompt takecontrolof c windowswinsxs. After that, I was finally able to delete the folder. Success 9 GB freed and no files were lost The Fun ContinuesWell that was exciting How much more space can I free upTree. Size told me there was a ton of other stuff taking up space, such as Adobe. Patch. Files, Speech. Analysis. Models and a few Local. Store folders. Most of them would probably never get used no sense keeping them all on my precious SSD drive If I could move it all to one of my larger capacity 7. RPM drives, I wouldnt have to worry about space and the performance would be good enough considering how often the files would be accessed. Typing folders into a command prompt didnt really do it for me, though not to mention mklink doesnt seem to work if theres a space in the folder name, such as Program Files x.