Reducing the size of winsxs folder of Windows 7

WinSXS folder size is a known issue – an reducing its size on Vista or Server 2008 is documented, but not for Windows 7.

This is what JDiskReports showed for drive C, Windows as well as the WinSXS folder:

Name    File Size  Files    % of Parent  % of Total
C:\     59,402,460 322,149  100.0%       100.0%
Windows 22,879,653 94,368   38.5%        38.5%
winsxs  13,937,982 64,135   60.9%        23.5%

After some Googling around I found this thread: http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itproperf/thread/09578403-a363-49ac-beb1-33f0da8d0e25/ which recommends the command:

dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded

After few minutes, I’m down to:

Name    File Size  Files    % of Parent  % of Total
C:\     55,284,474 305,922  100.0%      100.0%
Windows 18,759,931 78,136   33.9%       33.9%
winsxs  9,816,714  50,323   52.3%       17.8%

That’s 4117986 bytes saved (3.92Gb) on the SSD C drive!