Windows Update Cleanup safe?

[MilwaukeeLion]

Have win 10 stick pc with 6 G free of 28 G on C drive.  I do regular disk cleanups on it to free up small amounts of additional space.  An option recently popped up to free up 30 G by cleaning "windows update cleanup".  Could finally use for higher speed captures which require more storage.  Obviously don't want to do this if high degree of risk involved.  Right now all astro programs work and not very capable of fixing anything if something goes wrong?

Looked at it again, now says can free up 3.45 G not 30 G. Weird..

Edited July 16, 2019 by MilwaukeeLion
update,

[Alien 13]

I have wondered about this, some of the big updates are actually a completely new OS so in theory the old version could be deleted and in fact this happened to me once when the update failed to work and the nice man at MS gave me a link to the new patch ( was a brand new OS) which put the original software in an "old file folder" that I deleted after a few weeks.

Will watch the thread with interest.

Alan

[Skipper Billy]

I have the same size drive as you and run the cleanup inc remove old system files on a regular basis - never any issues.

You have probably realised that you cant install the latest update '1903' as the drive isnt big enough - 1903 needs 23gb for the OS and 7gb reserved for future updates.

 

[symmetal]

 

4 hours ago, MilwaukeeLion said:

Looked at it again, now says can free up 3.45 G not 30 G. Weird..

To clean out the old system files, to free your 30GB, when you run 'Disk Clean up' and have selected Drive C and OK, it runs and displays the non-system files that can be selected and cleared. Click the button 'Clean up system files' and OK and it will run again displaying the additional old system files that can be deleted. You have to scroll down the list and actually tick the system files to delete before it adds them to the total to remove. This will be your 30GB total I expect.

I always just tick everything and hit OK. It takes a long time clearing out old system files for some reason, up to 2 hours or more and you may think it's hung up but it will eventually complete the task. 

I always do this a day or so after a major Windows update when everything seems to be working especially if Drive C is an SSD just to get the disk space back.  To date I've never had a reason to regret doing this so soon after the update. 

Alan

[MilwaukeeLion]

5 hours ago, Skipper Billy said:

I have the same size drive as you and run the cleanup inc remove old system files on a regular basis - never any issues.

You have probably realised that you cant install the latest update '1903' as the drive isnt big enough - 1903 needs 23gb for the OS and 7gb reserved for future updates.

 

I gained 4 G up to 10 now.  Message says pc not ready for update 1903 yet nothing I need to do at this time.  Maybe a smaller update in the works.

[Ruud]

https://www.easeus.com/partition-master/cannot-remove-windows.old-folder.html tells you hoe to get rid of Windows.old, if you just want to do that.