I have had Win 10 installed on my devies for over a month can I now deleted any Win 7 or 8.1 files?

[Windows Central Question]

I understand your previous set up is preserved during a Win 10 upgrade but only for a month, that month has now expired for me so can I delete the previous Win 7 and 8.1 installs?

 

[stevesu]

It always depends on what you're trying to accomplish and do you know what you're doing...
I upgraded a tablet for my wife that only has a 64GB hard drive, so it was pretty full when I upgraded it. Since it came from her father, I deleted his user profile and the Windows.old folder and a couple apps in Add/Remove programs and it now has enough space to be usable.
You CAN go further than this, but is starts getting very risky.

 

[UKSteve]

Hi stevesu, thanks for the reply but what I was thinking was what I have done before, click on C drive and bring up properties on there is a button to clean up system files, which Windows does, no fiddling about for me. It takes a few minutes to gather all of these files then you get the usual pop up 'do you want to delete these files?' but as I have usually done a registry back I just go ahead and say yes. So I wasn't considering digging down in the bowels of Windows just use a facility that has been around for ages.

 

[stevesu]

You should be safe to do quite a few things, including what I mentioned above, which is more than most folks typically do.