Recently I did an in place upgrade of my Vista system to Windows 7. All went really well, and tonight I was doing a cleanup of the system and clearing out old files. I found using TreeSize Free tool that I had a couple of folder with 8.7GB+ of files in them – one called $WINDOWS.~Q and the other called $INPLACE.~TR as you can see below. These files are left over from the in place upgrade process and can be removed.
Ok – so I wanted to get rid of them. Trying to delete them normally is a problem as they can be protected by the OS. The secret is to use the Disk Cleanup utility. Run it by typing Disk Cleanup at the start menu.
It will scan your hard drive and show you the initial dialog box as below. You can see that it only thinks there are 62MB of files to remove.
You will need to select the Clean up system files button to allow it to scan for the system files which include the $WINDOWS.~Q and the $INPLACE.~TR folders. Once you do this it will show you the screen as below. Review the list and check each item you want to remove before selecting OK.
Now that’s gone – I’ve got another 5GB of space back.
THank You