Old Windows Updates

[Giftz]

When you right click Windows (C) drive and click properties, and then "Disk Cleanup" there's a 2nd button you can click to scan again and one of the things there is an option to cleanup/remove are old windows updates.

It says it never deletes old windows updates even if it downloaded a newer version of them. It just keeps the old version so you can delete them if you want. The old updates took up about 1.5 GB of the 22 GB windows uses on my C drive.

I doubt I'm going to delete them I am just curious, if you say do a system restore and it needs to restore to an older version where it had those old updates yet you deleted them with Disk Cleanup will it be unable to do the restore at all? Or will it just skip restoring that update because it doesn't have the old version to restore to?

 

[Giftz]

Basically if you delete those old windows updates can it no longer system restore back to those old updates? Is that where it gets the files from? Stored on your computer even though you don't use them currently, not downloaded online from windows?

 

[Giftz]

Oh yeah and I looked back into what the 2nd button was called. It was called "Clean up system files".

So you right click Windows (C) drive and click properties, click the "Disk Cleanup" button and on the next screen click "Clean up system files", and that's where on the list of items with boxes you can check to clear those files the old windows updates are one option.

Does anyone know about this. If you delete the older versions of these windows update files and if you were to do a system restore to a previous time when it used that older version of windows update would it not be able to revert to that old version since you deleted it? Thank you for any help!

 

[Giftz]

I think I found something about this online:

"To enable you to roll back to previous updates, updates are stored in the WinSxS store even after they are superseded by later updates. Therefore, after you run the Disk Cleanup wizard, you may be unable to roll back to a superseded update. If you want to roll back to a superseded update that the Disk Cleanup wizard deletes, you can manually install the update."

One question - where do you manually install an old update? Just through windows update somehow? Like you just check for updates and it will detect that you're missing the old version you deleted and reinstall it even though it has the newer version? Sounds iffy.

 

[Giftz]

Anyone have any idea?