How to Delete Windows.Old Folder? 3 Ways To Delete and Save Space

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When you upgrade an old version of Windows to a newer one, there is always a folder generated automatically called “Windows.old”. This folder on your computer takes a lot of space because whenever an upgrade failed, another copy of the previous version of Windows copied into Windows.old. This increases the size of the windows.old folder which cause storage crisis in your system. However, you can delete this folder, but it is slightly different from deleting a normal folder on your computer system. So, there are three ways for “how to delete windows.old” folder but before this know what exactly this folder is?

What Is the Windows.old Folder?

As I said, The Windows.old folder created when you upgrade from an older version to a newer version of Windows. It can anything whether you upgrade Vista to Windows 7 or Windows 7 to Windows 10 or an old Windows 10 to a newer Windows 10. This folder will always be created. So, this is not something new to the Windows PC.

Okay, now what exactly it does? When you upgrade your Windows to a newer version, the installation process saves a copy of the previous version in the “Windows.old” folder. This is done for the safety purpose if in case the upgrade has failed for any reason and you came into trouble. So, Windows.old folder just contains the old Windows system and if something wrong happens, or you changed your mind to go back to the previous one you can rollback or revert to the previous version. This contains all your installed programs and each user account’s settings and files, and everything from the old Windows, stored here.

Now, if everything is fine and you do not want to degrade Windows, you can then delete the Windows.old folder and save a lot of space. However, after a month, Windows will automatically delete the Windows.old folder to free up space.

Okay done explaining, Now follow the guide for deleting Windows.old folder and save gigabytes of storage on the computer system.

How To Delete The Windows.old Folder Using Disk Cleanup On Windows 10:

This is the primary method you can use to delete the Windows.old folder. Here are very few easy steps you can follow for this.

1. First of all open “File Explorer” and click on “This PC” from the left panel

2. You are seeing different drive option here. Choose the drive where you installed Windows 10. This is usually the “C” drive. So, select the “C” drive from under the “Devices and drives” section and right-click on it click on the “Properties” button.

How to Delete Windows.Old Folder? 3 Ways To Delete and Save Space 1

3. In the “General” tab, click on the “Disk Cleanup” button.

How to Delete Windows.Old Disk cleanup

4. Now a popup window will open, click the “Clean up system files” button.

How to Delete Windows.Old Folder? 3 Ways To Delete and Save Space 2

5. Just a few seconds while it takes for the calculation of the size of files. Now, after the calculation is done, find the previous “Windows installation(s)” option and check mark it. This will give the whole figure of your previous version of the windows in gigabytes (Usually in the range of 8GB to 20GB).

How to Delete Windows.Old Folder? 3 Ways To Delete and Save Space 3

Note: Always uncheck the “Downloads” folder if it contains any important folder or file you downloaded before.
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6. Click the OK button>Click the Delete Files button and select the Yes to confirm.

Now it’s done, you have successfully deleted the Windows.old folder from your computer system.

How to delete the Windows.old folder using Storage sense

This is another easiest way to delete the Windows.old folder from your machine. Follow the guide to do so.

1. Click on the start Windows icon at the bottom left and Open Settings. Go to the System and choose Storage.

2. “Turn On” Storage sense and click on “Configure Storage Sense and Run It Now”.

How to Delete Windows.Old Folder using Storage Sense

3. Now, Under the “Free up space now” section, check the “Delete previous version of Windows” option.

How to Delete Windows.Old Folder? 3 Ways To Delete and Save Space 4

4. Click the “Clean now” button and it’s done.

Once you’ve completed the steps, the folder with the previous installation of Windows 10 will no longer be available on your device.

Use Temporary files settings to delete the Windows.old folder in Windows 10

You can also use this option in Windows 10 settings to delete the Windows.old folder. Steps are the same as the previous method.

1. Click on the start Windows icon at the bottom left and Open Settings. Go to the System and choose Storage.
2. Under the “Local Disk (C:)” section, click on Temporary files.

How to Delete Windows.Old Using temporary files

3. Check the Previous Windows installation(s) option.

How to Delete Windows.Old Using temporary files b

Note: Always uncheck the “Downloads” folder if it contains any important folder or file you downloaded before.

4. Click the Remove files button.

Now done. You have just saved 10GB to 20GB of space on your computer.

Conclusion:

However, you can save more space but you can not revert to the previous version OS as Windows.old contains the files and a folder of the old Windows. After this, if you want to come back to old OS then the only option is to clean installation.

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