windows.old folder

[Carolv]

Hi all,

Went the other day and exchanged my SP4. The guy took one look at it and said it's a defective display and gave me a new one. Got home and set it all up. When I looked at the 'C' drive, there was a windows.old folder there with over 15 GB of data in there. Called support and they said that it might have been left when they set them up at the factory and that it should delete itself after 30 days. I got a brand new one not a refurbished one. Did a ran 'cleanmgr' and got most of the data removed. Had to run it twice only about 5xx kb remain.

Anyone else have this folder on their new machines? I wonder if it was something brought over from my Microsoft account when I logged in and it registered because the links in the 'favorites' folder were mine.

A few weeks ago I did take in my laptop to the MS store to have them put in a new hard drive. While there I had them do the upgrade to Win 10 from 8.1. Could these 'windows.old' be connected in some way.?

 

[rsutcliffe]

If the Windows 10 major update has been applied then you'll have the WINDOWS.OLD folder. Disk cleanup removes much of this, but appears to leave some used driver files behind. Don't know who told you that this would remove itself after 30 days, as I've never seen that behaviour in previous versions of Windows.

 

[Carolv]

If the Windows 10 major update has been applied then you'll have the WINDOWS.OLD folder. Disk cleanup removes much of this, but appears to leave some used driver files behind. Don't know who told you that this would remove itself after 30 days, as I've never seen that behaviour in previous versions of Windows.

Thanks. I know when I was setting it up I installed updates. I don't know it was the major one. When I check installed updates it just says 'Security Update for Microsoft Windows (KB3105211)'

 

[sharpuser]

I freed up 24GB with Start, Disk Cleanup, System Files, Previous Versions of Windows.