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A comment on Microsoft fixes a Windows 11 annoyance as PC revenue declines.

Re:Microsoft fixes a Windows 11 annoyance as PC revenue decl... by nukanse on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @10:06PM (#50361081)
My sister gave me his win 11 laptop to fix. 1 Tb SSD was full. Half of it was windows.old folder after 26h2 update. Windows has 5 different ways to delete that folder and none works. They are all badly documented. It spends 1 hour reading the file list before starting to delete... On a 4 tb/second nvme drive. Then spend a day "deleting" the folder, but doesn't deletes anything.

Finally, booted an Linux rescue distro from USB and deleted the folder.

Then had to clean the winsxs folder, which was full of useless files after an update.

In the end I cleaned 700 gb wasted.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Microsoft fixes a Windows 11 annoyance as PC revenue decl... by frankacter on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @10:36PM (#50361245)
Settings - > Storage -> Temporary Files

That's the universal way to clean up roll back installs and other Windows update related.

If that's not working for you, there's probably a much larger issue at play on her machine and would be much better off backing up her data, wiping all the partitions and installing fresh. You'll likely reclaim more than 700 GB.

The only time I've seen situations like what you're describing is when these are machines that have been in use for years and have major Windows versions on top of major Windows version stacked on top of each other, not just incremental updates.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Microsoft fixes a Windows 11 annoyance as PC revenue decl... by nukanse on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @11:27PM (#50361491)
That doesn't works, and it's a 1 year old laptop that came with 2024 windows 11 that accumulated updates up to 26h2.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Microsoft fixes a Windows 11 annoyance as PC revenue decl... by frankacter on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @11:32PM (#50361522)
You don't have the option? Or when going into system mode as part of temporary cleanup it doesn't show older Windows update as an option to clean or it fails when it tries?

What doesn't work specifically?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Microsoft fixes a Windows 11 annoyance as PC revenue decl... by nukanse on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @02:15PM (#50370204)
It had the option. It didn't worked. It used cpu for hours and nothing was deleted.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Microsoft fixes a Windows 11 annoyance as PC revenue decl... by lincon127 on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @01:11PM (#50369364)
Even better way to clean your Windows comp is to delete everything in C:\Windows
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Re:Microsoft fixes a Windows 11 annoyance as PC revenue decl... by kevin_thibedeau on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @01:05AM (#50361955)
> It spends 1 hour reading the file list before starting to delete

Shift delete bypasses the relocation of files to the recycle bin.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Microsoft fixes a Windows 11 annoyance as PC revenue decl... by NullPrefix on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @01:46AM (#50362193)
Shift delete still iterate files to calculate estimated time before starting the actual deletion
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Re:Microsoft fixes a Windows 11 annoyance as PC revenue decl... by vbezhenar on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @02:51AM (#50362540) 

    RMDIR [/S] [/Q] [drive:]path
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Re:Microsoft fixes a Windows 11 annoyance as PC revenue decl... by chris_wot on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @03:55AM (#50362970)
Try this instead:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Microsoft fixes a Windows 11 annoyance as PC revenue decl... by tencentshill on Wednesday November 04, 2026 @09:59AM (#50366471)
Or this:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/do-more-with-surface...

[ Parent | on HN ]