Introduction
Over time Windows 10 and specifically the Windows folder can get very huge sometimes 20GB and much more. If you already de-installed all unnecessary programs this article might help you. In my experience I can debloat/free/shrink/cleanup up to 10GB of disk space with these little helpers. Before my Windows folder was like 25Gb big and now just 16GB slim.
In some situations and also because Windows has a lot of automatic updates this can be very handy and extremely helpful and also Windows feels more stable, faster and lightweight after (for example a lot less to load). I would recommend it on a regular basis, especially the cmd sfc /scannow and dism are helpful, instead of a total new installation, which also involves a lot of customization work. Or you could restore a full image of Windows.
System prerequisites:
Windows 10
Start
1.) Built-in Disk Cleanup:
First off we start with the built-in Disk Cleanup:
Open File Explorer.
Right-click on the hard drive icon and select Properties.
On the General tab, click Disk Cleanup.
Disk Cleanup is going to take a few minutes calculating space to free up.
In the list of files you can remove, uncheck any you do not want removed.
Important: click "Clean up system files" on the bottom left and then select Windows update cleanup in the list!
Click "Delete Files" to start the clean-up.
2.) SFC and DISM
Open a command prompt with administrator privilege:
Press win to open the start menu. Type in
cmdto search for Command Prompt.Press ctrl+shift+enter to launch Command Prompt as administrator.
Then please type in sfc /scannow and press enter to let Windows first find and fix possible errors. This may take a while.
After the scan has finished, please type in DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth /StartComponentCleanup /ResetBase and press enter. This command also cleanup and repair Windows.
3.) Driver Store Explorer
Driver Store Explorer [RAPR] makes it easier to deal with Windows driver store. It supports operations include list/add/install/delete third-party driver packages.
Right-Click the .exe and start as Adminstrator because only then you can delete unused packages. Find and deleted all doubles or old packages. For example every time you have installed and updated the video driver the old driver isn't deleted from the driver store and a video driver can take up to 1GB of space. Basically this happens to all the drivers but you must be very careful which one you want to remove because you can brick Windows. Please if unsure only remove the video driver if there are doubles.
4.) wicleanup - Windows Installer Unused Cleanup Tool
The Windows Installer Unused Files Cleanup Tool (WICleanup) by KZTechs is able to scan for orphaned MSI and MSP files in the WindowsInstaller folder and offers you an option to delete them from the comfort of a graphical user interface. For scripts and command line usage, WICleanup also includes a command line version in the archive (WICleanupC.exe).
WICleanupC.exe -SOpen a command prompt with administrator privilege and type in WICleanupC.exe -S. This will find all unused MSI/MSP files and missing MSI/MSP files in Windows Installer storage location.
I find this tool very useful because even after I used the Windows disk cleanup, dism and driver store explorer this tool still find some unused files. However I read on the Internet there could be a problem with the uninstall of a program because sometimes the .msi files are needed, too. AFAIK I didn't experience it with this tool so far and most likely you can just reinstall the program and then deinstall it afterwards. Also there are some other tweaks to uninstall programs. Basically keep a copy of every installed program just in case the .msi gets deleted from the Windows installer folder.
However please be extremely careful and test this bad boy first on your configuration.
Update: After numerous bad remarks I verified the program with a new installation and with the command wicleanup.exe -r and it listed the newly installed .msi as unused. However if you delete the .msi file it can break the program, e.g. the uninstallation function can break for example if you want to uninstall it or even update it. Thus I can recommend the program only if you know what you are doing!
5.) Clean and Compress the Winsxs folder (Windows 7)
Although this script is written for Windows 7 it works perfectly with Windows 10. Basically it compress specifically the WinSxS folder and it can make a huge difference. In my experience it can save huge space.
compress_winsxs.batOpen a command prompt with administrator privilege and type in compress_winsxs.bat and answer all the questions and ignore the errors. The script may take a long time and after it finished it ask you to reboot the PC but you can just close the cmd prompt if you don't want to.
6.) Enable Windows compression for Windows folder
To get started, right-click the Windows folder and select Properties. Click the Advanced button under Attributes. Enable the Compress contents to save disk space check box and click OK twice.
That's it. I hope it helps!
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