up vote 4 down vote favorite
3
share [g+] share [fb]

I'm using Windows 7 64bit Premium for two years now and in this time my C:\Windows folder has grown to almost 30GB which is, in my opinion, inacceptable.

The biggest subfolders are winsxs (10.5 GB), Installer (5.5 GB), System32 (4GB) and SoftwareDistribution(2.5GB). I googled for the winsxs folder and found that it's important and may not be deleted. I googled for the Installer folder and found that it's mostly Office-related and that it might be reduced a bit by deleting Office updates.

But that's not satisfying. Does it really take 27GB to have a working Windows 7 plus up-to-date Microsoft Office?

Is there any way to safely shrink the Windows folder (without having to reinstall Windows 7)?

size chart

link|improve this question
Please note that this is not a duplicate, this is about %Windows% and not about %Windows%\winsxs. – Tom Wijsman Jan 6 at 20:59
1  
winsxs is the Windows component store. All the Windows components in C:\Windows (including various subfolders including system32 and SysWOW64 for 64-bit systems), C:\Program Files, and some items in C:\ProgramData are all hardlinked from winsxs. If the tool you're using isn't hardlink aware (and TreeSize Free isn't, nor is Explorer itself), the information you're seeing is misleading at best and downright wrong at the worst. – afrazier Jan 6 at 21:33
@afrazier Are Windows properties hardlink aware? The say 10GB too... – Baltram Jan 6 at 21:47
3  
No, the "Folder Properties" dialog is part of Explorer, and it's not hardlink aware in any way. Link Shell Extension can put an overlay icon on files with multiple hardlinks though. – afrazier Jan 6 at 21:51
feedback

2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Apart from compressing the Backup folder in winsxs (in its properties); you can't make the winsxs much smaller, unless you very carefully inspect all the entries as well as whether these are dependencies for applications on your system. But that's a very tedious thing to do, so the best thing you can do about it is installing as much applications and Windows features in the hope for it to turn smaller. Or well, reinstall your system. Please note that this is normal behavior, also listed in the system specifications.

Likewise, the Installer folder contains all your .msi based installation packages. These are kept such that you can still repair or uninstall applications. You can safely compress this folder to gain some space, but don't remove it unless you are sure you never need to repair / uninstall all installed programs.

Everything in the Download folder of SoftwareDistribution can be deleted, these are just downloaded updates from Windows Update. This however might make it so that you can't roll them back.

Also, regularly empty the C:\Windows\Temp folder if there's anything in there. You are supposed to use the Disk Cleanup wizard with Administrator privileges to do this, rather than doing it manually...

link|improve this answer
2  
SoftwareDistribution\Download is perfectly safe to empty after a reboot. It's a download cache and nothing more. No rollback information is stored there. C:\Windows\Installer can be safely copied to another drive and the original replaced with a junction to the new location. – afrazier Jan 6 at 21:34
feedback
up vote 1 down vote

Try WinsxsLite, read about it here, do a full system backup before you run it.

Program here

link|improve this answer
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.