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. Thus, Windows allows to significantly reduce the size of the WinSxS folder by removing the unused components from the disk. 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. To remove, for example, the TelnetClient feature from the Windows image (from the WinSxS folder), run the command:ĭISM.exe /Online /Disable-Feature /Featurename:TelnetClient /Remove Note that DISM, unlike the Uninstall-WindowsFeature PowerShell cmdlet, doesn’t remove dependent features.Ī complete list of available features in Windows 10 image can be obtained using the command:ĭISM.exe /Online /English /Get-Features /Format:Table You can start this task manually like this: This task runs in the background and automatically removes component versions older than 30 days that have been superseded by newer files. This StartComponentCleanup task is located under the \Microsoft\Windows\Servicing section of the taskschd.msc. In addition, Windows 10/Windows Server 2016 Task Scheduler has a special automatic maintenance task that regularly optimizes and cleans up the WinSxS folder (same operation as DISM with StartComponentCleanup parameter). Click OK to start the cleanup.Īfter you finish cleaning up the component store using DISM, check how much disk space has been freed.
The Disk Cleanup tool will show how much space you can free up by deleting old Windows update files.
You can find out the real size of the WinSxS folder on disk using the du tool from Sysinternals: 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 fact is that the WinSxS directory contains a large number of hard links (symbolic links) to system files in other folders.