Windows.old - Disc Clean Up

[anon(5340442)]

I upgraded my Windows 7 notebook to Windows 8 Pro a couple days ago to take advantage of the $40 offer and so far, quite pleased.

My notebook is by no means high end, its a Dell Inspiron with a Core i3-380M 2.53GHz dual core, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD.

Something I noticed when running the disc cleanup (clean up system files) - my previous Windows installation is 70.1GBs! I know Windows takes up a bit of room and expected to see 20-30GBs, but 70GBs? Thats insane. I want to delete it to get all that room back, but im hesitant because I dont know what could be in that file to make it so big.

One more thing to note, I did keep my files and settings when installing and know that the 70GBs are not my files (music/videos/pics etc). The only issue I had when installing is that Skype was opening at startup in desktop mode and caused the )-: (system crash screen) to come up. I just uninstalled Skype and all is good. It looks like this was happening because there were 2 versions of Skype, the new MS one and the old Skype one. The new MS Skype works fine.

 

[stmav]

If you want to uninstall Windows 8 and revert back to Win 7 then you will need these as part of the automated process.

If you delete these then you would need to re-install Win 7 (or whatever OS you had) as a new install.

Before you delete, just check that all your personal files / folders are in your new library.

One other thing, you may find under 'programs' in windows.old there is some data for apps you were running. If these apps / data weren't kept during the Windows 8 install process it might be worth keeping some of them as you may be able to re-install that app and copy some data across.

Saying that, the folder is not used at all by the new OS and is completely safe to delete and free up space.

 

[stmav]

Also here's a link that can help with deleting windows.old

How to Delete the Windows.old Folder After Upgrading to Windows 8 - Softpedia

 

[anon(5340442)]

I dont actually know where this file/folder is, I just read that it was called windows.old...So its a folder I can navigate (in my C drive)? Is there a way to just trim it down to a more reasonable size; like just keep the files to reinstall Windows 7 if I ever wanted to roll it back?

I still cant get my head around its size - 70GBs!?!

 

[anon(5340442)]

If you have upgraded to Windows 8 and kept your files and settings, whats the size of your previous Windows installation?