I upgraded my installation of Windows 7 to Windows 8. The upgrade took quite a long time, but the wait was well worth it. I have really been enjoying discovering the neat features of Windows 8 and sharing these tips with you on my blog. I hope that you have been enjoying the Windows 8 Tips series as much as I have enjoyed writing them. With this 11th article I would like to show you how to save some disk space…. ok, perhaps loads of disk space. Did you upgrade your copy of Windows to Windows 8? If so, read on.

While the Windows 8 upgrade was in progress, Windows stored some files in case you wanted to roll back the Upgrade or troubleshoot anything that went wrong. If you have upgraded and used Windows 8 for several days and you decide to keep Windows 8 on your machine, you can remove these files stored during the upgrade. To do so, head on over to Computer and select the Properties of the C Drive. (You can also hit the Windows button and start typing “Disk Cleanup” and Windows 8 will filter your search to display the results you are looking for)

On the Properties window, click on the Disk Cleanup button.

Windows will now scan your C drive and calculate the amount of space you will save.

The Disk Cleanup screen for your drive will display the areas where you can safely save some disk space by removing unnecessary files. To the bottom part of the screen, click on the Clean up system files button.

Windows will now do another scan.

From the next Disk Cleanup screen you will see that the Windows Upgrade left a few Gigs of data that can be removed.

If I scroll down further, I can see that there are also quite a large amount of log files that can also be removed.

Doing this via the Disk Cleanup utility is the correct and safe way to remove the files. When the cleanup is complete, you can give your machine a reboot if you like. Doing this gained me an extra almost 5 GB (excluding the 1 Gig + files in my recycle bin). Easy peasy lemon squeezy… ok that was lame, but you get my drift.