Windows – Disk Cleanup (cleanmgr.exe)

Warning! Out of date content.

Last week I was notified one of my Windows 2008R2 virtual servers had a nearly full system drive. As I prefer to start addressing a problem by using tools (and methods) supported by the supplier I went looking for the disk cleanup utility (cleanmgr.exe).

The disk cleanup utility is part of the Desktop Experience feature which isn’t installed by default on Windows 2008 (and 2012) server. Installing the Desktop Experience feature on a server to restore a utility that you will only use occasionally seems overkill.

Microsoft to the rescue! This technet article describes how to make the utility available without installing the whole Desktop Experience feature.