In case you ever need it, I followed this advice, and it cut the winsxs folder just about in half. Everything seems to be working fine. All that I lost was the ability to roll back to a previous Service Pack.
- Start an elevated command prompt (run ‘CMD’ as administrator) and …
- Run the DISM command, which replaces the old VSP1CLN and COMPCLN we used on previous Windows versions: DISM.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /spsuperseded
- Wait 10 minutes before the task completes ( it ends with “Service Pack Cleanup operation completed. The operation completed successfully”)
Normally you should have been able to reduce the Winsxs folder size by 1 or maybe 2 GBs, sometimes more. Saved space may vary a lot.
Just know that after using DISM you will not be able to uninstall the Service Pack 1 anymore.
Let’s have a look at the used switches for DISM.exe:
- The /online switch tells DISM to work on the running OS installation
- The /spsuperseded option removes the backup files created during installation.
Optionally you could use the /hidesp option which will remove SP1 (KB976932) from the “Installed Updates” section of Programs and Features, to ensure that users do not try to uninstall the Service Pack.
EDIT:
Also see this https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff630161(v=ws.10).aspx