Warning about disk cleanup tool regarding windows update option

Chrysalis · 24 Aug 2021

So the windows explorer disk cleanup tool, has an option for cleaning old windows updates, for some reason on my laptop this has been runnning for just over 3 hours with steady writes going to the SSD on it with high cpu consumption, so I tried to find out whats going on, I came across this article.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldne...2-00/?p=104252

In short it seems who ever designed the tool made the assumption that if you wanted to clean up old update files, you also must want to compress all your system files.

So just a heads up, I expect many dont use this now as its deprecated, but was a bit of an eye opener that happens without specific consent.

Ghot · 24 Aug 2021

@Chrysalis

Interesting article.
Might try doing "just" this instead. Open an elevated command prompt, and run this command...

Dism.exe /online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup

Bree · 24 Aug 2021

Chrysalis said:

In short it seems who ever designed the tool made the assumption that if you wanted to clean up old update files, you also must want to compress all your system files.
So just a heads up, I expect many dont use this now as its deprecated, but was a bit of an eye opener that happens without specific consent.

Settings > System > Storage seems to perform the same functions as Disk Clean up, so it may do the compaction as well. As pointed out in that article, it is not a 'given' that compression will take place, it only happens if it would be beneficial.

The other thing that the Windows Update Cleanup task does is check with the WofShouldCompressBinaries function to see whether the system would benefit from compression of system files.

You can check that for yourself, in my case there would be no compression.

Warning about disk cleanup tool regarding windows update option-image.png

Compress or Uncompress Windows 10 with Compact OS