When you encounter these folders again after upgrading Windows, follow the same procedure to delete them. When prompted for confirmation, click on on the “ Delete” button to delete $WINDOWS.~BT and $WINDOWS.~WS folders. From the list, select the checkboxes next to “ Previous Windows installation(s)” and “ Temporary Windows installations files.”Ħ. The above action will scan your system again for all the files that you can clean from your system.ĥ. So, click on the button “ Clean up system files” button appearing at the bottom.Ĥ. As I said, these folders are system folders. Now, select the “ C” drive from the drop-down menu. Open Disk Clean-up tool by searching for it in the start menu.Ģ. Being system folders, you need to use the Disk Cleanup tool. Windows.old folder is also related to the previous Windows installation.ġ. Also, when you delete $WINDOWS.~BT folder, it will delete Windows.old folder too. Note: After deleting these folders, you won’t be able to go back or downgrade to the previous Windows version. To be safe, create a system restore point before making changes. One thing to keep in mind while deciding to delete these folders is that after deleting, you won’t be able to downgrade to the previous Windows installation. If you are good with that then proceed with the below steps. Considering my 256 GB SSD, that’s is a pretty good chunk of usable space. In fact, in my case, I claimed back nearly 35GB space. So, if you are good with the current version of the Windows then you can reclaim a considerable amount of space by simply deleting Windows BT and Windows WS folders.
These are the setup files that help you upgrade your machine to the latest version of Windows.
For instance, when you upgrade from v1090 to v2004, these folders are automatically created with all the files relating to your previous Windows installation. $WINDOWS.~BT and $WINDOWS.~WS folders are created when you upgrade from one Windows version to the other.
Deleting these folder will instantly free up a ton of space. If you are running out space on your hard drive or don’t like wasting that much of space then you delete Windows BT folder and delete Windows WS folder for good. As you can guess, that is a huge amount of space to be spared. Typically, the size of these folders will be anywhere from 15GB to 40GB depending on your system.