Windows 10 has been a fruitful upgrade for me and I don’t regret upgrading to Windows 10. A lot of people say that they regret upgrading to Windows 10, but this is not the case with me. I haven’t faced any problems with the Windows 10 yet. It has definitely boosted my productivity with its multitasking features that enhance my daily usage of the laptop.
The only one thing bothering me was that after upgrading to Windows 10, I had very less available space left on my primary hard drive. After going through my C drive, I found that there is a folder by the name of “Windows.old” on the root of my hard drive. After researching here’s what I found and this is how it can help you.
The Windows.old folder is a backup of your earlier version of Windows before upgrading to Windows 10. Windows creates this folder to allow you to restore back to an older version of Windows altogether. You should keep this folder on your drive for at least a few weeks after upgrading to Windows 10 just to be sure that Windows 10 is right for you. When you are sure, here’s how you can free up some space on your laptop.
Clean up Space on Windows 10
Windows packs a feature called the Windows Disk Cleanup in Windows 10 (it was available in earlier versions of Windows as well). This feature simply cleans your computer of garbage data or temporary files that were copied during installation into some temp locations. In order to use this feature, follow these steps.
- Search for “Disk Clean up” from your Start Menu and launch the utility.
- Next, choose your primary hard drive from the drop-down menu and wait for it to calculate the information on its own.
- Here, choose the option to “Clean up system files” near the bottom of the window.
- Again choose your primary hard drive partition and wait for the tool to calculate the data that can be deleted.
- When it shows you the results, scroll down and check the following options: “Previous Windows Installation” and “Temporary Windows Installation Files” mainly. You can select other categories as well.
- In my case, the total size of files to be deleted was around 24GB. That is a lot of data to be spared for Old Windows Backup which might not be of any use.
- Finally, choose the OK button at the bottom and wait for the tool to clean up your hard drive of this junk data.
I hope the above tutorial helped you recover some of your hard drive space after upgrading to Windows 10. Other than the tutorial mentioned above, you can install CCleaner on your computer and run it regularly to free up your hard drive of garbage.
