This was the query of one of our readers who wanted to know about this folder in Windows 7 called WinSxS. The folder contains thousands of files and occupies Gigabytes of space.

Info about this folder

The folder called WinSxS stands for Windows Side-by-Side and is used to store versions of Windows components that are built to reduce configuration problems with Dynamic Link Libraries (DLL Hell). Multiple versions of components are stored in this folder.

In short this folder usually does not contain any useful data contents of which may be deleted to reclaim the occupied huge space.

However cleaning this is not easy if the folder does not get clean up by executing a disk cleanup then you might have to format the system to get the used space.