I was cleaning up my old laptop (which my daughter is using now) and it was severely lacked disk space to operate. I tried conventional ways and able to get some space, but was not enough.
Analyzing the system, I could see there are there are several iteration of windows updates and multiple version of windows components are there. Most of these components are stored in WinSxS folder. Looking at the size of this folder, I could see it is huge.
WinSxS -> short name for Windows Side-by-Side.
How do I clean-up this folder? It was too risky to manually delete stuff in here as it is windows system component folder. There fore I turned to ChatGPT (in old days it would have been Google), to find the answer.
One of the suggestion by ChatGPT was to use dism command line tool.
What is dism command line tool?
DISM -> Deployment Image Servicing and Management. DISM can do lot more than cleaning up WinSxS folder. If you need to know more about it read this article from Microsoft.
You can use following command to analyze the component store:
Dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore
You will see output similar to below:
Component Store (WinSxS) information:
Windows Explorer Reported Size of Component Store : 9.17 GB
Actual Size of Component Store : 8.70 GB
Shared with Windows : 4.04 GB
Backups and Disabled Features : 4.66 GB
Cache and Temporary Data : 0 bytes
Date of Last Cleanup : 2025-10-29 02:50:09
Number of Reclaimable Packages : 8
Component Store Cleanup Recommended : Yes
The operation completed successfully.
When you are ready to clean-up, run following command:
Dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup
If your system is stable and you are sure, you don't need to rollback any components add "resetbase" option to above command to clean-up further.
Dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup /resetbase
But after resetting, you will not be able to un-installed already installed updates.
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