Windows 10 post-upgrade cleanup tips

At the end of July 2016, the free upgrade from Windows 7 and 8.1 to Windows 10 will come to an end. In the meantime, lots of users and admins may find themselves electing to exercise their upgrade options, rather than let them go unused.

Having been through more than 100 such upgrades myself, and witness to thousands more, I've observed that the process is mostly trouble-free as well as fairly quick and painless. But once the Windows 10 upgrade process is complete, some additional tweaking and cleanup is a good idea.

This is particularly true for systems where reclamation of 20-30 GB of disk space on the boot/system drive could be either helpful or downright essential. That means it applies primarily to lower-end tablets, notebooks and laptops, with boot/system drives of 128 GB or smaller.

The post-install cleanup process can be broken into the following phases:

•     Cleanup and removal of install files
•     Driver catch up and cleanup
•     Additional cleanups where indicated

Ready? Let's get started.
 
Cleaning up and removing install files

If you take a look at the folder structure on the boot/system disk on a machine that has recently been upgraded to Windows 10, you'll see one or more of the following folders on that storage device:

    Windows.old: When you upgrade a Windows OS, the Windows installer renames the base folder for the previous Windows installation from “Windows” to “Windows.old”. On my two test machines, those folders are 14.3 GB (Windows 10 Enterprise) and 13.6 GB (Windows 10 Pro) in size. Either way, that's a substantial chunk of disk space worth recovering on a smaller storage device.

    $Windows.~BT: The dollar sign at the beginning of the file name means that the folder is ordinarily hidden from view. This particular folder usually includes the files used to perform a Windows update, along with supplementary log and data files. On the aforementioned Windows 10 Enterprise test machine, this folder is 3.76 GB in size; on the Windows 10 Pro test machine, it's 63+ MB. The disparity in folder size reflects that install files have been cleared from the $Windows.~BT folder on the Enterprise test machine, but not on the Pro test machine.

    $Windows.~WS: This hidden folder stores Windows folders, profiles, the Program Files and Program Files (x86) folders, AppData and so forth from the previous Windows installation. It provides important information should one wish to revert from the upgraded Windows 10 installation to whatever Windows installation preceded it. I've seen sizes as low as 3-4 GB for this folder and as high as 10-12 GB.

Add it all up, and you're talking about somewhere between 18 and 30 GB of disk space altogether. Recovering that space can be a good idea, particularly on boot/system drives that are on the smaller side. That space recovery precludes another kind of recovery, though: if you decide to do away with the remnants of the previous Windows installation, you will be unable to revert to that installation. By default, Windows keeps these files around for 30 days, then automatically deletes them itself at the next scheduled disk cleanup.

On systems where boot/system disk space is scarce, I recommend plugging in an external USB drive and making an image backup of that drive before applying the Windows 10 upgrade. That way, if you decide to revert to your previous version of Windows after performing the Windows upgrade, you can still do so, even if you wait more than 30 days after the upgrade occurred to roll back. (See my CIO.com article How to use Windows 10 backup and recovery features for the details.)

Doing the boot/system disk cleanup

Don’t let all of this background and context fool you, the actual cleanup operation is simple and straightforward. First, run the standard Windows Disk Cleanup utility (type "disk clean" into the Windows 10 search box and it will come right up). You will need to run the utility again because, after selecting Disk Cleanup the first time, you must click the "Clean up system files" button on the resulting cleanup report to put the tool to work on Windows install files. Figure 1 is a screen cap from the Windows 10 Enterprise test machine that shows the two big space suckers that appear after a Windows 10 upgrade.


Read the whole story: http://www.cio.com/article/3070383/windows/windows-10-post-upgrade-cleanup-tips.html

find other great windows 10 articles at:  http://mithileshjoshi.blogspot.com/2015/08/windows-10-tips-and-tricks-2015.html