Clean up after Windows Update

Last Updated on November 20, 2016 by Dave Farquhar

Thanks to a new tool that Microsoft pushed out in 2013, it’s very easy to clean up after Windows Update and free up a bunch of disk space.

In 2013, Microsoft released a new Disk Cleanup tool. Click your start button and type “Disk Cleanup” to launch it. If you see a new option called “Clean Up System files,” you got the update. If you don’t see it, visit this page (Internet Explorer-only, unfortunately) to grab it.

Click that button, and Windows deletes the obsolete backup files from the WinSxS directory. In my case, I had about 4 GB of old updates to purge. If you run Windows on an SSD like I do, you’re going to want that space back.

Now if you’d like to automate the process, the knowledge base entry linked above has instructions for a corporate environment. For a standalone machine, it’s a little simpler.

Open an administrative command prompt and enter this:

cleanmgr /sageset:11

Now select your cleanup options (be sure to include Windows Update Cleanup).

Now, any time you issue this command:

cleanmgr /sagerun:11

Windows will clean up its old update files.

Create a scheduled task to run this command occasionally, keeping some distance from the second Tuesday of the month just in case Microsoft releases a patch you need to reverse (rare, but not unheard of), and you’ll keep more of that space free.

How often do you need to run it? I built this system in question in November 2010, using a completely slipstreamed copy of Windows, so 4 GB represents about three years’ worth of updates. So, based on that, a month’s worth of update backups consumes about 113 MB of disk space. I think I would run it every two months at most, for safety’s sake.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.