I hate manually using system utilities but I must admit the windows update cleanup in Windows 7 is a great tool to use. Let me show you how to free up probably a lot more to space than you might imagine.
I’m sure you’ve all used the windows disk cleanup at some stage to clear out temporary files, error logs and other bits and pieces to get back a bit of disk space before.
There is a new option in the disk cleanup, found in Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 which is called the windows update cleanup. What this does is get rid of old Windows updates that are no longer needed. Not that there would be too many ‘old’ updates in the latest version of windows, but I’ll take any disk space back 🙂
Unbeknown to me, this feature was also made available in Windows 7 back in October 2013. Awesome! Lets’s check it out and see how much disk space we can get back.
As always, to launch the Disk Cleanup tool, go to the  the start menu or start screen and type Disk Cleanup. If you have got more than one hard disk you be prompted to select which drive. This is no different to what you have done before it no doubt.
Now, when the following window displays, you’ll see a button labelled system files (highlighted). Click on this, and again you be prompted to select the drive (in the majority of cases it will again be drive C).
The next window that will come up will look very similar to the first, but upon closer inspection your see that there are additional options to select. As you can see on the graphic below, there is an option labelled Windows update cleanup.
Obviously you would select the applicable types of files that you want to cleanup and hit OK for the process to begin.
If you notice the figures on the right hand side on this graphic, just the windows update cleanup selection alone on my computer resulted in me regaining over 4Gig of hard disk space! This is my system drive which is only a 120Gig  SSD that was just about full. I now have some breathing space.
Leave some comments below – were you aware of this feature? And how much disk-based did you regain?