Win 7 SP1 Cleanup/Succour for Tyrants...

[Kilmatead]

Now that you've had a chance to let SP1 settle in without hiccups, on the odd chance you were wondering what Windows was doing for half-an-hour when you installed the measly 80MB SP1 update for Windows 7 (assuming you started with an up-to-date installation in the first place - larger, if you didn't), it basically created more backup files than a growing boy's daily allowance calls for.

To clean up all that nonsense (and gain back a GB or two), as described here just open up an elevated command prompt and copy/paste the following deliciously cryptic command:

dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded /hidesp

Windows will chew on that for a few minutes (surprisingly longer than you'd expect), but in the end it will happily clean out all the leftover rubbish - leaving you free to bake a cake for the beleaguered Gaddafi, as lord knows he could use a little sugar-comfort about now.

[fgagnon]

Thanks for pointing that out.
I recovered 2.8 GB on my laptop.

[Kilmatead]

I only gained 1.6 GB, but that's better than nothing.  I had completely forgotten about cleaning out this stuff until I did a virus scan yesterday that inexplicably took ten minutes longer than usual - it seems SP1 "backed up" virtually every DLL in the \Windows directory whether it needed to or not (which considering x64 doubles-up all the files anyway, that can add up to "lots and lots").

This was simpler on Vista, as MS included a special cleanup tool for that one.  This one's not as obvious - but worth the trouble.

Cupcakes for Mubarak!

[fgagnon]

and in the opposite direction, today I succumbed to installing sp1 on my wife's w7 desktop, and found it consumed 5.2 GB in the process.  

If we experience no issues over the next couple of weeks I'll see how much of that I can recover by removing the superfluous backups.