Windows 10 storage menu says updates are taking up 10.8GB of space.
@rickeo To try and see where OP was coming from, I tried looking it up myself on my own machine. Turns out, running Disk Cleanup doesn't change the number that you see in Win10's Settings as far as Update at the bottom goes :
Here's what I did.
First, I compared Disk Clean-Up to Windows 10's temporary files setting. Settings shows the temporary files to be removed to be larger, with 119MB in "updates" at the bottom. The difference is size is likely due to Settings also wanting to clean up the Downloads folder.
I then ran Disk Clean-Up. Made sure to select the option to clean up System Files.
After that cleanup, settings still showed the 119MB in update, but only 126KB in temporary files (once Downloads was deselected). So it did clean all the same temporary files. Just not the update ones.
As such, from doing so, I can safely deduce that Disk Cleanup does not, in fact, remove the space used by updates, just like OP said in their post.
@joe_clark These files are indeed windows update temporary files and should normally remove themselves after a while. You can force this behavior by deleting them yourself.
After investigating, I pinpointed their location as being the usual windows update temporary download folder. As you can see, mine is exactly 119MB, just like Settings says in my previous screen captures.
To properly clean this folder, you can technically just outright delete everything in it if it lets you, but it likely won't help, you need to stop the service. The easiest way to do so, is to do the following:
Quote
- Open the Start Menu, once open don't touch anything and simply start typing the following
cmdto search for the command prompt
- Run as administrator
Accept the UAC prompt that Windows displays.
- Run the following commands and hit enter after each line:
net stop wuauserv cd %Windir%\SoftwareDistribution del /f /s /q Download net start wuauserv
This should clean up everything. Reboot afterward. For me, this "fixed" it and settings doesn't report anything anymore for Updates.
Find out more here:
https://www.ghacks.net/2017/11/16/how-to-delete-downloaded-windows-update-files/
As well as another method. Including a batch file to do it automatically simply by double clicking on it.
Edit : God this forum is buggy as shit with images sometimes and didn't realize PowerShell was trash and didn't recognize some CMD commands.
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