If NOT reverting from Win 10 to Win 7, which files/folders can be deleted?

[Harvey]

A friend upgraded her HP laptop from Win 7 to Win 10, and she asked me to go through it to review her new setup. I did the usual, updating her AV, anti-spyware and other resources and scanned her drive, and it looked pretty good and stable.

This machine has a 330 GB drive with the three partitions I expect on an HP laptop. Drive C is 273 GB, drive D is the 2.23 GB recovery partition and dirve E is 3.95 GB, labeled "HP_TOOLS."

The odd thing is that 273 GB of drive C is used, but I don't find a lot of video or other programs or files that would use all of that space so I'm wondering, if she's firmly committed to staying with Win 10:

1. How much space is used by the files required to roll back the machine to Windows 7?

2. Where and what are they, and can they be deleted to free up space on her hard drive without damaging her Win 10 installation?

I have further questions about whether and how the original HP recovery partion will work if she needs to do a full restore back to the original Win 7 setup, but it uses only a few GB so I'll deal with that once I get her to the best basic configuration going forward.

TIA. 🙂

 

[Puffnstuff]

The best thing to do is run disk cleanup and when it asks you if you want to delete installation files tell it yes so the old files get removed.

 

[nerp]

Disk cleanup. Then "cleanup system files" after that to do a second-level scan. Then check "previous windows installations."

 

[Harvey]

Thanks to both of you for the replies, and thanks for the follow up info, nerp. 😎 :thumbsup:

Will Disk Cleanup report how much space it will freed up?

 

[nerp]

Yes, you'll get a list of items to check off and each item will show you how much space it currently is occupying on the disk. The previous Windows installation could be 8GB or more. It's basically everything in the Windows.old folder.

 

[Mem]

This guide might help, http://winsupersite.com/windows-10/windows-10-post-install-clean.