Most people get the notice about updates on their systems and say OK and don’t think about it again. They most likely wont notice the missing 500MB of storage that’s gone. For many power users this is no big problem, but for those people who have Notebooks with smaller drives this could make a difference.
But WAIT – you don’t want to delete these files for a few weeks of use to make sure you don’t have issue with the update. Once you feel that you have used your system without any issue, then you might want to take a look at the following article from HOW-to Geek to remove and restore that storage. At the same time you can remove some other stuff as well!
After you install the Windows 7 Service Pack 1 that we mentioned yesterday, you might be wondering how to reclaim some of the lost drive space—which we’ll show you how today—but should you actually do it?
Note: If you haven’t installed the new SP1 release yet, be sure to read our post explaining what it entails before you do. Spoiler: it’s mostly bug fixes.
Should You Delete Windows 7 Service Pack Backup Files to Save Space?
Wait, What Now?
It’s simple: installing the service pack will take up a bunch of extra space, because Windows is going to create a ton of backups of the pre-service pack files in case you want to roll everything back and uninstall the service pack. This could be anywhere from a few hundred MBs all the way up to a GB or so.
You can easily clean out these backups with Disk Cleanup (see more below), but don’t rush to do that. Keep reading.
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