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An essential part of system administration is to look after your systems and keep them in tip-top condition. Microsoft has some tools to maintain the disks, namely the Disk Cleanup utility.

This is however not installed by default on older server operating systems 2012 R2 or earlier unless you have installed the Desktop Experience feature. Installing this is as simple as adding the feature from System Manager. There is a but here, it will need to reboot to complete the feature.

As we all know some servers need looking at and a reboot in the immediate is not an option. Well, you can install disk cleanup another way that will help you run the application immediately. (Providing you have not emptied your WINSXS drive)

Simply copy the following files:

C:\Windows\winsxs\amd64_microsoft-windows-cleanmgr_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16385_none_c9392808773cd7da\cleanmgr.exe

Copy this file to %systemroot%\System32

C:\Windows\amd64_microsoft-windows-cleanmgr.resources_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7.7600.16385_en-us_b9cb6194b257cc63\cleanmgr.exe.mui

Copy this file to %systemroot%\System32\en-US

You can now launch Disk Cleanup from a run box with cleanmgr

(To have this showing in Disk Properties WILL need the Desktop Experience feature installing, however the above might help if the need to run a disk cleanup is there.

Disk cleanup will in many cases trim out the Windows Updates amongst other files in a neater way than having to go in and manually remove files that could cause issues down the line.

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