Windows Taking Up All of SSD

Toots

Hoping someone here can help - my Dad bought one of these for an elderly relative, and they rang him today to say they're getting a message saying that there's low disk space.

He took it, and sure enough, it's showing 1.6GB free on a 32GB SSD. The lady who owns the computer hasn't actually got anything saved on it bar about 4 small word documents, so when we checked the Windows folder is showing up as "Size 23.7GB Size on disk 18.4GB".

We tried doing a disk cleanup, which freed up about 50mb, and also used that program called Patch Cleaner, but didn't get any joy there either. The laptop is only 3 months old.

Is there anything we can do to free up disk space? I don't want to go deleting files in case I break something. We've already deleted a load of the bloatware that comes with HP stuff, but I don't think there's anything else left to uninstall in that regard.

Mech1

if you upgraded to windows 10, I think it keeps a full copy of your old system too!

Toots

Mech1 wrote: »

if you upgraded to windows 10, I think it keeps a full copy of your old system too!

It came with Windows 10 (more's the pity) and we didn't back up from any old accounts or anything, just literally switched it on and set it up as brand new.

Cordell

You can do a disk cleanup and select the system cleanup option, but you can expect to end up with about 20G occupied by windows + drivers + pagefile. 32G is way to small.

Toots

Cordell wrote: »

You can do a disk cleanup and select the system cleanup option, but you can expect to end up with about 20G occupied by windows + drivers + pagefile. 32G is way to small.

I shall try that and report back! 32G is a bit crap if the bloody system is going to be taking up the whole thing. :mad:

Toots

I'm up to 1.62GB free now

bonzodog2

You could save 4GB by turning off hibernation. Open a command prompt as admin, type
powercfg -h off

Delete old restore points
turn off shadow volume copies

Toots

bonzodog2 wrote: »

You could save 4GB by turning off hibernation. Open a command prompt as admin, type
powercfg -h off

Thanks! It got me up as far as 2.6gb free now, so that's progress.

Delete old restore points
turn off shadow volume copies

I checked and system restore wasn't even set up! So there hasn't been a restore point created since we got it. Volume shadow copies is already off (I think - when I went in to disable it, the only option I was given was to start it)

Cordell

When you did the disk cleanup, did you press "Cleanup system files"? Did you tick all the checkboxes, before and after pressing it?
Is there any windows.old directory?
What is the size of c:/users directory?

Clean windows and some small apps and drivers should take just under 20G. In any case, this is a laptop that is not supposed to store anything locally, that's why it comes with office356 and cloud storage subscriptions...

Capt'n Midnight

32MB means it's a Chromebook , only useful to access stuff stored on the internets

ccleaner
PC Decrapifier
uninstall add/remove things you don't need, won't be much

get an SD card
reduce the size used by system restore , but not too much and only after it's booting reliably after the previous steps

you can compress files to save space but don't expect much
also don't bother compressing photos or videos or music or PDF's or office documents, they are already compressed and compression makes data recovery more difficult

Toots

Would it be a good idea to just wipe it and stick Ubuntu on to it instead? She literally only uses it for going on the internet and there were 4 one-page word docs on it in the "user" folder, which were under 1mb all together.

adam240610

Toots wrote: »

Would it be a good idea to just wipe it and stick Ubuntu on to it instead? She literally only uses it for going on the internet and there were 4 one-page word docs on it in the "user" folder, which were under 1mb all together.

If you have 2.6gb free then I think you're fine already

gctest50

.


https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php


be a bit better, has media players n things

Toots

adam240610 wrote: »

If you have 2.6gb free then I think you're fine already

My concern would be that this could be an ongoing issue every time there's a windows update.