Jonas Stawski

Everything .NET and More

Deleting the Windows.old directory after upgrading to Windows 8 Release Preview

With the release of Windows 8 Release Preview comes the necessity to upgrade. If you are running Windows 8 Developer/Consumer Preview it is as easy as running the Setup and upgrading. The setup was pretty fast and very easy to follow, they even cut the steps down from previous version of Windows. After the upgrade you will notice that your free space on your hard drive has diminished by quite a lot. That is probably due to the fact that your old Windows directory has been moved by the setup to C:\Windows.old. You might feel inclined to delete by simply deleting the folder, but you will get Access Denied errors all over the place. I’ve read online a bunch of solutions to get around these type of errors, but they are all too cumbersome.

The easiest and probably supported way is to do so from the Disk Clean up prompt. To do so go to your Computer, right click on C and select properties. From there click on Disk Cleanup.

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Click on Clean up system files. This will change the options in the “Files to delete:” section and will include “Older version of Windows”. Select that option as well as any other option you wish and press OK. This will get rid of the Windows.old directory without any errors.

Happy testing!

Comments (17) -

Mick Ismail
Mick Ismail

The above statement in Google saved me a lot of time. Using an iconia tablet with 32gig you can imagine. Thanks

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Thx a lot!

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Thank you, very much.

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Very clever. It works.
Thanks!

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Rudi Australia
Rudi Australia

great to the point info!!!
Thank you very much!

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Very handy info Jonas

Thanks

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Thanks very kindly, Jonas.  Great solution and quick!!

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Thanks a million, perfect easy working solution.

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Thank you very much. It works for me.

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Awsome.. Thanks very much

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It didnt work!

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Nizar Lakhani
Nizar Lakhani

Thanks for suggestion...!! it's work perfectly.

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Thanks for the tip ! 30Go was stuck because of those old files (on a 120Go SSD that's matter !)

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Works a treat thanks for this

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Thanks for this!

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Thanks dude.  Smile))))))))
For this epic post.

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Anirban Das
Anirban Das

nice n short!
good work bro!!

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