WinSXS bloat

[miniman]

My daughter's laptop is asking for a Win 10 update (it's already on Win 10). To do this it needs 8Gb free space - it only has 4Gb free. The Windows folder is 16Gb of which the WinSXS folder is 7Gb. Cleanup won't clean anything else up.

How can the OS seriously require 14Gb and then a further 8Gb to update?

Any tips?

[zippy3x]

Firstly the cleanup tool has a "clean up system files" button, which will remove more stuff. Have you done this?

Secondly if you only have 32Gb of storage, that probably still won't be enough. What you will need to do is get a clean USB stick (or one you can wipe) and create an OS image on there and upgrade from that.

https://www.rizonesoft.com/upgrade-windows-10-crea...

Instructions here are for an older update, but steps should be the same (when it downloads the windows 10 image it should just get the latest version)

Only other thing I would say is that there will be another big update within the next couple of months, so keep you USB stick handy

[mizx]

I'm guessing this is a 32GB eMMC device? These probably should never have been on sale as Win 10 devices, 32GB was never enough really.

Image on USB media as above should do the job.

I've just gone through this with the Asus one we have. Luckily it has a 2.5" slot so I stuck a 38 quid 120GB SSD in it instead, which has improved performance too. Used Macrium Reflect to image/recover partitions to the new disk, as other imaging software seems to not support eMMC properly (don't forget to use sector-by-sector copy and set the boot partition... ).

Any of the well known cleanup applications will remove GBs more than you will be able to using disk cleanup, but it still won't be enough. Even if the update can be done using media, it's probably better to increase the storage now if you're able to.

Edited by mizx on Sunday 18th March 17:18

[TonyRPH]

If you have sufficient RAM, you could disable the swap file temporarily.

Also, turning of hibernate will save a load of space too.

These two steps should provide you with enough free space to upgrade.

To disable Hibernation:

The first step is to run the command prompt as administrator. In Windows 10, you can do this by right clicking on the start menu and clicking "Command Prompt (Admin)"
Type in "powercfg.exe /h off" without the quotes and press enter. If you typed it in correctly, the cursor will simply start at a new line asking for new input
Now just exit out of command prompt

ETA:

clean-winsxs-folder-to-save-space

Edited by TonyRPH on Sunday 18th March 17:44

[miniman]

Thanks for the tips. Have done the clean up thing, still not enough space left. It's a cheap ASUS so suspect it is the 32gb eMMC "drive".

[Penelope Stopit]

miniman said:

Thanks for the tips. Have done the clean up thing, still not enough space left. It's a cheap ASUS so suspect it is the 32gb eMMC "drive".

Does it use system restore and if so can you check how much has been allocated

[sgrimshaw]

Don't bother trying to make space, from personal experience it's a fruitless chore.

Just use the USB flash drive approach as mentioned earlier, you'll save hours of frustration.

[miniman]

sgrimshaw said:

Don't bother trying to make space, from personal experience it's a fruitless chore.

Just use the USB flash drive approach as mentioned earlier, you'll save hours of frustration.

It's an update to existing Win10 install - will it see USB drive as "storage" for this purpose?