How to clean up a Windows disk (and prepare for dual-booting, and why you should)

[liam_on_linux]

I keep getting asked about this in various places, so I thought it was high time I described how I do it. I will avoid using any 3rd party proprietary tools; everything you need is built-in.

Notes for dual-booters:

This is a bit harder with Windows 10 than it was with any previous versions. There are some extra steps you need to do. Miss these and

Comments

[dj_alexander]

Posts like this feel like a little bit of a throwback. What with VMs, cloud computing and disk space getting cheaper all the time, it feels like spending time dual-booting a system, or manually cleaning Windows, are activities which belong in the IT history books. Apart from gaming, which I rarely do on a PC these days, my desktop and my server have become little more than basic hosts for whatever VMs I need.

Good on you for keeping the faith though. It does feel like a throwback, but it also makes me feel a little bit nostalgic for the days when I had a quad-booting system just because I could.

[liam_on_linux]

Interesting.

I mean, in terms of servers and so on, yes, definitely.

But a _lot_ of people are still running Windows boxes to get their job done. Even in $DAYJOB, a Linux vendor, the sales and HR and facilities people run Windows, because it makes inter-working with customers and suppliers easier.

For private individuals wanting to get off Windows 7, which goes end-of-life in about 2 or 3 weeks now, this is suddenly really important. They *can* still get Win10 free, but doing this first will help a *lot*. Or, they could go to, say, Linux Mint, in which case this _still_ helps.

I wonder if more people run Windows boxes at home than on corporate networks...? I don't know. A well-run corp.net does stuff like this automatically, but I've worked on a lot, and few are that well-run, I'm afraid...