After updating the OS, many people want to immediately delete the windows old folder in Windows 10, without waiting for the system to automatically erase these files. This can be done through the Disk Cleanup utility and the command line.
After the automatic update of the licensed version to Windows 10, the Windows.old folder appears on the hard drive for the official rollback of the system to an earlier assembly with the preservation of personal data. The system will automatically delete these files after a month. If you are sure that you do not want to go back to the previous version, then you can clean the disk yourself, because Windows.old most often takes up several GB of memory. To prevent bugs from forming in the system, the folder with the data of the previous OS can be removed from the computer using the Disk Cleanup utility or the command line.
You can call the "Disk Cleanup" utility by right-clicking on the Windows disk (C:) and going to the "Properties" - "General" - "Disk Cleanup" section. You can also open it using the "Win + R" keys, enter cleanmgr in the Run window input field, click "Browse …", select Windows 10 (C:) and scan. Click "Clean up system files", select the necessary items related to the section of past Windows installations, and click OK.
If the first cleaning option did not work, then you can delete the windows old folder in Windows 10 via the command line as an administrator. Go to "Start" - "Command line (administrator)", drive in RD / S / Q C: / windows.old and click on Enter. After processing the data, the file with the old system will be completely deleted from the computer without the possibility of its recovery, and you will see how there will be significantly more free space on the C: drive.
