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There are a number of sub $200 Windows 10 laptops with only a 32 GB SSD hard drive, like Lenovo 100s, HP Stream 13, etc...

Given that the Windows directory itself is over 32GB on my regular laptop, how do these laptops even function? Is there space to store anything? Wouldn't I have an out of hard drive space problem very soon?

Braiam
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AngryHacker
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    Post Windows 8.1 support bootable .wim images, which means, it can be a reduced foot print – Ramhound Dec 09 '15 at 20:44
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    There's lots of other space-users in a long-installed Windows system. I've got one here with 2.1 GB in the CBS (update) log alone! Add another 8 GB for installer caches, some 5 GB for hardlinked SxS binaries (take no real extra space but shows up as extra in naive usage algorithms), etc. – Bob Dec 10 '15 at 01:50
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    There are a lot of hardlinks in the Windows folder. Many disk-usage tools are unaware of these and will count the size of each link, even though only one copy of the data is actually taking space on the disk. – nobody Dec 10 '15 at 04:30
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    What do you mean, *as little as*? That's over 20 times what Windows 95 required! Get off my lawn! – user253751 Dec 10 '15 at 05:39
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    Are you sure your Windows directory *actually is* 32GB? On disk? What Explorer tells you - based on summing the file sizes of all the files in the directory - gives incorrect results when you have simlinks and whatnot, which is why everyone thinks the WinSXS folder is bigger than it actually is. See https://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/library/dn251566.aspx – piers7 Dec 10 '15 at 06:49
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    @user20574 20 times? IIRC, Win95 was about 50 megabytes. More like 600 times. – oals Dec 10 '15 at 08:44
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    Windows 3.1 used about 10 MB of disk space. Windows 10 is a better operating system but probably not 30000 times better :-) – RedGrittyBrick Dec 10 '15 at 11:49
  • A 32GB Windows folder is pretty bloated. Have you been running W10m for awhile without doing any cleaning? From a poll I did on G+ (obviously very scientific), the average space was between 19-25GB. – Carcigenicate Dec 10 '15 at 17:29
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    @user20574 I'd install Windows 95 on it, but it doesn't have a floppy drive :) – AngryHacker Dec 10 '15 at 18:04
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    32GB is damn large. Forget Windows 95, even Windows XP needed like 1.5 GB. – user541686 Dec 10 '15 at 19:59
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    @AngryHacker: ah, then you need to install Windows 95 in a virtual machine with an image file of the floppy disk mounted... – leftaroundabout Dec 11 '15 at 01:28
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    The question to ask is: how can an OS install in 32 Gb and **not** have 31.7+ Gb left over for you. – Kaz Dec 11 '15 at 18:49
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    32 Gb is enough for something like 100 hour-long instructional video lessons, shot in 720P, on how to design and implement an operating system. – Kaz Dec 11 '15 at 18:51
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    Sorry for late joining: __"as little as 32 GB"?!?__ _NanoLinux [ [1](http://sourceforge.net/projects/nanolinux/)] is an open source, free and very lightweight Linux distribution that requires only __14 MB of disk space including tiny versions of the most common desktop applications and several games__._ [ [2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanolinux) ]. ps> MS-DOS 6.22 [takes](http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=399297) just under 7MB of space... Are you sure you need each of that 32GB? :-) – Hastur Dec 11 '15 at 19:49
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    OSes can be designed to run using even less space: [MenuetOS](http://www.menuetos.net/)'s core kernel, including all drivers necessary to operate a system, loads onto a 1.44MB floppy disk, and it's a real-time multitasking graphical operating system, and even comes with some preinstalled games, a compiler, text editor, etc. The extra GB of data comes from all the drivers/hardware support, language packs, shared libraries, specific file formats used, and so on. Also... backwards compatibility. They could probably get Win10 down to a few GB if they dropped support for all apps below Win7. – phyrfox Dec 11 '15 at 22:16
  • "...as little as 32 GB of disk space" What a time to be alive to hear that. – Derek 朕會功夫 Dec 12 '15 at 03:54
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    Windows 10 requires _32 gigs_ just for the OS files? What the heck is it _doing?_ AFAIK modern full-featured OSes should be on the order of 4..6, maybe 8. The most recent versions of OS X are; an Ubuntu liveusb fits in about 1; and, of course, you can get those tiny Linux distros that take up a fraction of that. – Blacklight Shining Dec 12 '15 at 06:09
  • @RedGrittyBrick Disk space itself isn't really important - if you look at price-per-windows-disk-space, Windows 10 is much cheaper. The Windows 3.1 I had run on a $400 (today-dollars) 20 MiB HDD, while my Windows 10 installation comfortably fits on a $50 *SSD* - platters are even cheaper, of course. – Luaan Dec 12 '15 at 10:33
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    @BlacklightShining Device drivers on their own take more than 8 GiB. That's the price of having Plug and Play that *actually works*. In any case, it doesn't take up 32 GiB - it's more like 16 GiB for the 32-bit version, and 20 GiB for the 64-bit (which of course includes the 32-bit "emulation" subsystem), including all those Documents and Settings etc. Also note that the installation files are just 3 GiB - most of the size is from things that compress easily, but can't be compressed for some reason. – Luaan Dec 12 '15 at 10:37
  • @BlacklightShining the fresh 64-bit Windows 10 install takes just about ~9-12GB with compact OS. If you use some installer-customization solutions like NTLite to remove unnecessary drivers that could easily stripped down to a few GBs – phuclv Mar 25 '18 at 05:12

7 Answers7

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Windows 10 uses CompactOS, which compresses Windows files, to make them smaller:

Compact OS Compact OS installs the operating system files as compressed files. Compact OS is supported on both UEFI-based and BIOS-based devices. Unlike WIMBoot, because the files are no longer combined into a single WIM file, Windows update can replace or remove individual files as needed to help maintain the drive footprint size over time.

This can be done automatically by the Windows setup or by manually applying an Image :

DISM.EXE /Apply-Image /ImageFile:INSTALL.WIM /Index:1 /ApplyDir:C:\ /Compact:ON

or in a running Windows via this command:

COMPACT.EXE /CompactOS:always
magicandre1981
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  • It will probably have a lower performance to load files, but since these are machines with SSD, it will be still better than with uncompacted in HD. – Zanon Dec 10 '15 at 21:28
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    @Zanon Yet these are also machines with the slowest processors still on the market, and decompression is done by the CPU. Also, these devices usually use slower eMMC instead of SSD. So performance will in some cases be considerably worse than HDD devices. Source: I owned one of these devices. – Peter Dec 11 '15 at 13:44
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    Use `compact.exe /compactos:query` in a cmd window to check if your system is in compact mode or not – nixda Dec 11 '15 at 22:01
  • Unfortunately switching on CompactOS mode recovered only less than a GB in the end with my mother's HP Stream 11. – icelava Jun 01 '18 at 05:25
  • @icelava [Use TreeSizeFree](https://superuser.com/a/965332/174557) to find hidden data junk. Microsoft is awre of issues and it looks like they try to [build a special edition](https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/25/17279042/microsoft-windows-10-lean-edition) for such low end devices. – magicandre1981 Jun 01 '18 at 14:02
  • In reality I had to perform several space-scavenging activities to allow the Windows 10 April 2018 update bulk in. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-update/how-to-squeeze-major-windows-updates-into/e89f9319-5068-40c5-a7f9-301194449c79 – icelava Jun 09 '18 at 13:15
  • @icelava have you tried TreeeSizeFree or not? – magicandre1981 Jun 09 '18 at 16:19
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I'm not sure what you have on your laptop but a clean Win 7 install is usually about 12GB's and Windows 10 is spec'd at 16GB's for 32 bit and 20GB's for 64 bit. All that extra on yours might be bloatware from the manufacturer. The 10 GB or so left after the Win 10 install is plenty for a 'netbook', if you want to call it, that will surf the web and word process. There are so many cloud saving options out there it is less important for data to be stored locally.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-specifications

Also, I would bet that these will have the Home edition and maybe a Home Starter edition like older Win 7 cheapies that won't even let you change the backround. Very small footprint on those.

Cand3r
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    The Windows directory on my (Win7) machine is 26GB, and I'm certain I don't have any "manufacturer bloatware". I assume the extra is from updates and stuff (or maybe it's counting /winsxs?) – BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft Dec 10 '15 at 05:14
  • @BlueRaja-DannyPflughoeft I don't use Windows 10, but in earlier versions, the "rollback" feature (which is enabled by default) could accumulate enormous amounts of data. – Kevin Krumwiede Dec 10 '15 at 05:17
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    @BlueRaja-DannyPflughoeft You are correct, it is update, here is a good comparison http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/07/faster-booting-smaller-footprint-make-windows-10-an-easy-upgrade-for-old-pcs/ Win 7 with all updates can push 33GB on disk – Cand3r Dec 10 '15 at 13:17
  • Will W10 have the same problem with the OS directory growing steadily due to patches over time? Or due to MS's non-enterprise policy for Windows being that you must install all patches; will they automatically remove files needed to uninstall patches after a certain amount of time to stop them from exploding the directory size? – Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight Dec 10 '15 at 17:00
  • @DanNeely I can't find it now but I did read somewhere that it depends on regular, compressed, or WIM install. Magicandre1981's answer above talks about the compressed install and how Windows can 'maintain its footprint'. – Cand3r Dec 10 '15 at 17:46
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    @BlueRaja-DannyPflughoeft If you run Disk Cleanup as Administrator, you can see how much space the uninstallers for various Windows updates are consuming (and remove them if you want). – jamesdlin Dec 11 '15 at 22:51
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    @BlueRaja-DannyPflughoeft How do you measure the disk footprint? Explorer doesn't take all those hardlinks and virtualized folders into account, so it *massively* overreports the disk usage (it might very well be that your OS directory only takes ~16 GiB). Updates do take a lot of space (you can remove them with Disk Clean-up), as well as other installers (Windows preserves installers to allow Remove/Repair). .NET also takes quite a bit if you're a developer - in my case, over 4 GiB. – Luaan Dec 12 '15 at 10:47
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Many of the Windows 8.1 devices have moved to "WIMBoot". This runs the PC from a compressed Windows image file. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn594399.aspx

Windows image file boot (WIMBoot) lets you set up a PC so that it runs directly from a compressed Windows image file (WIM file). WIMBoot can significantly reduce the amount of space used by Windows files. This helps you provide more free space to users, and helps you manufacture Windows on PCs with smaller drives.

Leopoldo Sparks
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    @bwDraco no, not correct, because WIMBoot is removed in Windows 10 because it caused setup install failures. It uses **CompactOS**, see my answer – magicandre1981 Dec 10 '15 at 05:37
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    The linked article specifically states: *Applies To: Windows 8.1*. While not conclusive evidence, as the article hasn't been updated for a year, Microsoft is pretty good about revisiting older articles and updating them if they apply to more recent versions of a product, so this can at the very least be seen as indicative. – user Dec 10 '15 at 10:24
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Windows 10 uses compress boot which free's up 2-3GB. Windows 10 install using compress boot will only take up 7-9GB. Also there is no longer a need to make a separate partition for the recovery image which will free up an additional 4GB.

user531764
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I've just done a clean install of Windows 10 and Office 365 on a 32GB HP Stream 7 and it's taking 13.9GB including about 400MB of my OneDrive files. It also supports a 32GB SD card (rumour has it that 64GB also works) which on Windows 10 can be used for personal folders and applications.

I've not forced the OS to compact using the procedure described here

David Marshall
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    When I got HP Stream with 32GB eMMC, Windows 10 64bit preinstalled. It had 13 GB free first. I uninstalled some HP stuff I decied not to use. I created two more users (one with existing Microsoft account). Then the computer decided to update. Now I'm down to 1GB and I'm thinking how to get out of this. There are no big games, no big applications, nothing. I consider: 1) removing all the users and leaving only admin there (e.g. browser caches always explode quickly, better have it for a single user), 2) compact, 3) switching to Linux. – virgo47 Jun 05 '17 at 07:44
  • @virgo47 same here. No apps, after 1 update there is insufficient free space for the next update. – Alex Shroyer Mar 25 '18 at 00:01
  • @hoosierEE The computer didn't boot the next day, and all ways to self-repair it failed. That update demaged HP repair partition, for other repair paths it wanted me to boot the system (which wasn't possible). There is Linux now, I'm not totally happy with any desktop environments I tried, but at least it works. :-) – virgo47 Mar 26 '18 at 06:22
  • Heh, "at least it works" would be nice brutally honest tag line for Linux. – Alex Shroyer Mar 27 '18 at 12:05
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In addition to the existing answers, a clean OS install of Windows 10 is somewhere around 10 GB, depending on what exactly is installed. I did even manage to get it down to 7 GB once. This will grow over time as patches are applied, browsers build up huge caches on disks, and logs grow. When space gets scarce, Windows will do some cleanup on its own, and let the user know to run Disk Cleanup (right click on the drive->Properties).

If you run Disk Cleanup, and also click "Clean up system files", then check all the boxes, your Windows folder will become considerably smaller than 32 GB.

Additionally, any program you install stores a footprint directly in the Windows Directory, in folders like Windows/Installer, or Windows/InfusedApps/Packages.

Peter
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I can say with authority that Windows 10 runs well with a 32 GB SSD, since i've created a couple of virtual machines having exactly that amount of space and 1.2 GB of RAM, running also a SQL Server 2012 with no problem.

Aditionally, Microsoft guarantees Windows 10 good performance having at least 20 GB of hard disk space:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-specifications#sysreqs

Nevertheless, I encourage you to install just the basic application for daily tasks, and trying to use as many web applications as you can since space would be limited :)

Juan Pablo Orradre
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