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.

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frankacter 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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nukanse 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That doesn't works, and it's a 1 year old laptop that came with 2024 windows 11 that accumulated updates up to 26h2.

	▲	frankacter 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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?