<img attachment="disk_cleanup2.png" align="right-column" class="frame" caption="Disk Cleanup -- Windows.old & Recycle Bin"><img attachment="disk_cleanup.png" align="right-column" class="frame" caption="Disk Cleanup -- System Files">If, instead of installing Windows 8 on an empty drive, you upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8, the installation process retains a copy of your old Windows 7 installation in a folder named "Windows.old". As you can see from the screenshot, this folder can be pretty big. If your Windows 8 is running fine and you have no plans of downgrading, you can safely throw away this folder. What's the best way to delete this folder? It's probably protected and deleting it manually will be rife with mysterious error messages and frustration. For several versions now, Windows has included a "Disk Cleanup" tool that makes it pretty easy to find and remove unneeded files from where they tend to accumulate: <ul> The Recycle Bin The "Temp" folder Windows Error-reporting files Debug Dump files (crash logs) </ul> In the screenshots, you can see that my "Windows.old" folder took up almost 25GB of space and that I had over 25GB of files in the Recycle Bin (I'd been moving around and organizing a lot of large files). On top of that, Windows was keeping almost 6GB of error-reporting files in its queue---I'm all for informing Microsoft of crashes so that they can fix bugs, but if you haven't sent them by now Windows, I'm going to delete them. So I clawed back almost 61GB of space for my own use. Not bad. I wasn't at all near the limit on my nearly 500GB drive, but machines equipped with smaller SSDs may benefit significantly from an occasional cleanup.