My storage situation on my PC is a mess. I probably should just get a new drive or two and start with a fresh install, but right now I don’t have the time or funds to properly set up my storage system to my liking, so I’ll have to deal with it for the time being.
Right now I have about three drives in my PC: an SSD and a couple of HDDs. One of them has two partitions, the other just one. No real order to it all, just a random bunch of drives that hold my data. JABOD is what they call it I think. Not great, but it’ll do for now.
I’ve done some manual cleanup on the drives, removing large files I don’t need and attempting to get rid of files from old Windows installs. The only thing is, you can’t delete all of the files in the Windows.old folder. The Windows.old folder contains a bunch of system files and other stuff from your old Windows install. If you try to manually delete them, Windows will throw you a “Trusted Installer” error basically telling you that you can’t delete them. If you upgraded to Windows 10 from 7 like I did, you’ll have a Windows.old folder hanging around somewhere just in case you want to roll back to 7. Seeing that 7 is out the door and no longer being supported by Microsoft, I figured it would be a good time to just get rid of those files. A podcast I was listening to mentioned the Disk Cleanup app, so I did a little research and ran across an article recently on how to delete those Windows.old files. Time to fire it up and free up a little space!
The app took a little bit to launch and I had to restart it since you will need to run it as administrator to delete any previous Windows installs. After I did that I checked in Windows Explorer to see which drives had Windows.old folders. My C and D drives both had previous Windows installs on them, so I ran it on both. I selected the drive, made sure everything looked okay and set it in gear. A dialog warning appears to make sure you definitely want to delete those old installs. Click yes and be prepared to wait a few minutes.
In total I freed up a modest 38.6 GB of space on both drives, 13.5 on the D, 25.1 on the C. Not much, but it might let me install another game or two or a few apps. Even though I didn’t save much, I thought Disk Cleanup was a handy tool to get rid of those pesky ‘undeletable’ files that throw the “Trusted Installer” warning when you try to just throw them in the Recycle Bin.
If you’re running low on storage space on your PC and upgraded to 10 from a previous version, now might not be a bad time to run Disk Cleanup to free up some space. Just keep in mind that once you delete those files, there’s no going back to 7 or 8, so consider making a USB restore stick just in case something goes wrong in the future. Once you do that, free up some space and enjoy a few extra gigs of storage!
Benny's Bits and Bytes 