How to delete downloaded Windows Update files

Windows Update works for the most part pretty reliable. It is an automated system of Microsoft's Windows operating system that handles the downloading and installing of updates for the operating system.

At best, it is a silent service that runs in the background; it may ask you to restart the PC every now and then though as that is still required for many updates.

When you run into issues though with updates, you may spend hours or even days figuring out what is going wrong.

I cannot update one of my PCs to the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update for instance because of a bluescreen that I get whenever I try.

One of the things that you can try when it comes to updates, is to delete downloaded Windows Update files to start over.

If you suspect that something is wrong with the files, or if you want Windows Update to run a new check for updates to download new versions of updates that were released by Microsoft, then you may find the following tip useful for that.

If you run Windows Insider builds on a PC for instance, you may skip an already downloaded update to a new build to download a newer build and avoid having to update the system multiple times.

How to delete downloaded Windows Update files

It is thankfully pretty easy to delete all cached update files. This works on all supported versions of Windows, including Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10.

1. Go to C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution\Download using Explorer or any third-party file browser. If you navigate to the folder manually, you may need to enable the showing of hidden files first.
2. Select all files of the folder. The easiest way to do that is to use Ctrl-A while the folder is active.
3. Hit the Delete-key on the computer keyboard.
4. Windows may need administrator privileges to delete certain files. Select "do this for all current items" and click continue to grant the permissions.

You can re-run a check for updates once all files have been deleted. Please note that Windows Update will download all updates anew when you clear the update cache. This can lead to Gigabyte large downloads.