Reclaim Your Space After Windows Spring Creator Update 1803
The Windows Spring Creators Update 1803 was released a couple of days ago and has some welcome new capabilities.
Timeline the new icon to the right of your Cortana search box (or Windows key and tab) - lets you quickly jump back to previous documents and websites you were working on. It integrates with the task view and will gradually populate as you work. If you're using a cloud account, then it also happily synchronizes across your devices. Pretty smart.
Fonts have at last been moved into System Settings, including previews - which is extremely overdue - and makes life a lot easier for graphic designers.
Audio settings have acquired a new ability - You can now, configure prefered audio input and out devices for each open application, rather than relying on a single operating system-wide, default device. This is going to make life a lot easier for those who are constantly having to change audio settings to accommodate IP telephony apps like Microsoft Skype, Web conferencing such as Cisco WebEx, or video editing.
There are also a lot of graphical UI improvements, an ability to quickly see apps that StartUp automatically with your PC and an absolute barrage of changes which will make it simpler for companies to switch from SCCM to Azure policy management through MDM or run management as a hybrid.
However, this post is about the disk space that you can reclaim after the upgrade. On many machines, you may find as much as 35GB swallowed up as Windows backs up the previous edition of Windows during the upgrade.
Now don't go making this change, if you're not happy with this 1803 update - but if you do want to reclaim your 35GB - then here's how to do it.
Click on the Windows key - and type Storage. There's a new option 'Free Up Space Now' introduced with this update. Click it - and you should see an unchecked section saying 'Previous Windows Installations'. Check it and click 'Remove files'.
After a few minutes, your operating system drive should be able to loosen its belt again with a sigh of relief.
