You may have come across it on your hard drive, a folder called Windows.old. When you open it you will find all kinds of folders and files, which may give you the feeling that it is an important folder. But what exactly is this folder, and more importantly, can and should you delete it?
Not everyone who has Windows on their PC will find this folder. It is in fact a folder that is created when you update Windows to a newer version (where we mean major updates, such as from Windows 8 to Windows 10). Microsoft would like to offer users the option to revert to the previous version of Windows if they don't like the new version, or, as happened not too long ago, there are problems with a new version of Windows that make a downgrade the only option. is. For that reason, all files from the previous installation of Windows are kept in the Windows.old folder, which directly explains the name of this folder.
Can you remove Windows.old?
When you see this folder on your hard drive, you will also notice that its size is quite large, in some cases even more than 10 gigabytes. We can imagine that you would like to see this folder disappear from your hard drive. But can you just delete it without any problems? That is certainly possible, but it is not really necessary, because Microsoft will delete this folder automatically after a month. If not, you can of course remove it manually. However, you don't do that by clicking on it and pressing the Delete key, because the folder is protected against deletion. You can change the folder's permissions, but it's much easier to start Disk Cleanup in Windows and check Previous Windows installation(s). After performing this operation, the Windows.old folder will be gone. Be aware that this means that a downgrade is no longer easy to perform.
