Member Avatar for Member #1091071

I've just reinstalled windows 8.1 on my new PC, and for some reason my hard drive's already got 90Gb of data on it (bearing in mind i'm only using a 500Gb hard drive).

Windows.old is only taking up 11Gb or so, which I'm going to delete.

What the heck is going on???

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Dani AI

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Fresh installs can still show a lot of used space because several large system items are hidden from a normal Explorer view: the paging file (pagefile.sys) and hibernation file (hiberfil.sys), Volume Shadow Copy / System Restore data, the Windows component store (WinSxS), and previous-installation/update caches. ’s suggestion that installed RAM affects some of this is correct — pagefile and hibernation-related files scale with memory and Windows’ settings, and shadow-copy storage can also consume gigabytes. (learn.microsoft.com)

Quick practical checklist (safe-first approach):

  • Run Disk Cleanup as an administrator and choose Clean up system files (this is the supported way to remove Previous Windows installations and update cleanup entries). 
    cleanmgr.exe
  • Inspect shadow-copy usage and allocation:
    vssadmin list shadowstorage
  • If hibernation is not needed, turning it off removes hiberfil.sys (requires admin):
    powercfg -h off

    These steps match Microsoft’s guidance for removing previous Windows installs and examining shadow copies; Disk Cleanup often “recalculates” sizes when run with system privileges, which explains the OP’s Windows.old size change. (support.microsoft.com)

If Explorer still reports unexpected used space, measure and reclaim component-store and update leftovers with DISM before attempting manual deletions. Example commands (admin):

Dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /AnalyzeComponentStore
Dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup

Use /ResetBase only when ready to give up uninstalling older updates. For a visual, drill-down inventory of large folders/files use a disk-usage tool (TreeSize, WinDirStat, etc.) to find true space hogs and confirm what can be safely removed. (learn.microsoft.com)

Cautions: avoid deleting system files directly from Explorer; don’t disable the pagefile or remove hibernation if crash-dumps or sleep behaviour are needed; and take a backup or system image before aggressive cleanup.

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Member Avatar for JorgeM

How much memory does your system have? The more memory the larger the pagefile. That could be one reason

Member Avatar for Member #1091071

Update: turns out windows was miscalculating the size of the windows.old folder.
While starting up windows clean up, it recalcuated it to 68Gb.

Left me with a fair bit more space.

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