How to remove the Windows Rollback item that can appear in the boot menu when starting the PC after installing a feature update .

If you have updated Windows with the installation of the latest feature update (both in the case of Windows 10 and Windows 11) it is possible that the boot menu will appear with the Windows Rollback item each time you start the machine . The latter allows you to start a system recovery procedure by drawing on the backup information saved in the Windows.old folder .

When you install an annual Windows update ( feature updates for Windows 10 and Windows 11 are released at this cadence), all information about the previous operating system configuration is stored in the Windows.old folder .

Making sure that everything works fine after upgrading to the new version of Windows, there are a few important things you can take into consideration to remove Windows Rollback from Start Menu:

1) The Windows Rollback entry is automatically deleted together with all contents of the Windows.old folder 10 days after applying the update.

If you would like to get a few more days to check that your system and installed applications are fine, you can increase the number of days to go back to the previous version of Windows . The same procedure is applicable for both Windows 10 and Windows 11.

2) The intervention that allows you to recover space after installing an update for Windows allows both to remove the Windows.old folder and to eliminate the Windows Rollback item from the boot menu.

As we have seen in the article, there are three methods to remove files from the previous Windows installation.

3) If you want to avoid the appearance of the boot menu with the Windows Rollback item without depriving yourself of the possibility of restoring the system, simply open the command prompt by typing cmd in the search box and then selecting Run as administrator .

By issuing the command bcdedit /timeout 0 you can remove the countdown and in fact avoid the appearance of the menu also containing the Windows Rollback item .

To restore its appearance, the same command can be typed by replacing 0 with a number between 1 and 30 (seconds that must elapse before the default operating system starts in the absence of any type of choice on the part of the user).

In all cases, after restarting the system, the Windows Rollback item will disappear from the start menu and Windows 10 or Windows 11 will start automatically without proposing any additional steps.