Thursday, September 17, 2015

How do I clean previous windows files?


I just upgraded from Windows 7 to 10, thinking it would make a clean install I backed up everything. Now that it's installed, old files are still there in C:/, there is hardly any disk space left.



  1. How do I clean all the files from the previous install? Will it clean up all the disk space? Most of them are in windows.old folder I suppose.


  2. Clean install again. How?



Answer



There are two kinds of installs:



  1. Clean installs (aka format and install, or wipe and load)

  2. Upgrades.


You selected upgrade so it did not do a clean install. Instead it tried to keep as much old stuff working as possible.



As to how to do a clean install. Just use the install medium again. In the first part of the disk format the old partition. That will yield a clean guaranteed install. There are tools to reclaim space and doing that and defragmenting might yield the same disk space. Might. I clean install is fast en sure and it is the method I always used.



Note 1: Windows 10 is a preview. Do not try to use it as a main OS. Support for it will end and there is typically no way to upgrade previews to the full version. So if you want to move to windows 10 in a couple of months you will have to do another install.


Note 2: It is a previous, with possible bugs (heck. Likely bugs!) and with extra logging. Do not use it for anything else than testing. E.g. do not use it for Internet banking, on-line purchases or anything privacy related.




[Edit: Tested windows cleanup - system files]


Starting with a clean installation of windows 7 to test with.


Disk space used after a clean windows 7 installation


Starting the windows 10 preview iso and selecting upgrade (thus keeping old files)


Install win10 preview


Installing on the same disk/partition as the previously installed OS.


over the old OS


Now running windows 10. Not much disk space left with the old folders still present.


disk space after upgrading win7 to win 10 preview.


search


Results:


results after the cleanup


No comments:

Post a Comment

linux - How to SSH to ec2 instance in VPC private subnet via NAT server

I have created a VPC in aws with a public subnet and a private subnet. The private subnet does not have direct access to external network. S...