Windows 10 How big are your Windows 10 installations?

MikeHawthorne

Essential Member
Microsoft Community Contributor
Hi

I came to my attention today that some people seem to have much smaller Windows 10 installs then I do.
I don't have any software in my C:\ drive other then a few really small things like CCleaner etc.

I have W10 installed on a 100 Gb partition.

It uses 63 Gb of that.
Only 10 of those are in my Users, Program Files or Program Files (x86) folders.

My Windows folder is 29 Gigabytes.

After the last update I had over 30 Gigabytes in my Windows.old file to be removed.

How big are other peoples Windows 10 installs?

And anyone have any ideas about what could be making mine so big?
I avoided adding a lot of fonts etc, that I would normally have, and I move the Pagefile to another drive.

if I have all those language packs installed where would they be and how could I get rid of them.

Mike
 
Open an admin command prompt and type
Lpksetup /u
That should show you whether or not you have additional language packs other than English installed.
 
My Windows 10 is very barebones.
I have installed Abyword, for ease of writing docs. I have transferred my album of pictures and docs over, again for convenience.
Cleaner and nothing else of significant size.

I have three users, and my total user size is 3.24Gbs.
My overall Windows 10 size is 18.2Gbs.
My Program files together are 2Gbs.

Windows folder is 12.3Gbs.
Based on the last, your Windows folder seems excessive. But they all top mine by a considerable margin.

First suggestion. Have you any games, internet or others, working from your computer? They can be very large these days.
 
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Hi

I have a lot of very big stuff, but it's all on my D:\ drive.

Some of the games save in my Users folder, and I delete the old saves but my Users folder is only 5 Gigabytes.
It's the Windows folder itself that seems to be really large, at 29 Gigabytes.

But I don't know what would be in there that isn't in everyone's install.

When I type in...

Lpksetup /u

I get a message that says, "Runtime Error" This application requested the Runtime to terminate in an unusual way.

When I ran a search for lpksetup I got 199 objects, many mui files and resource folders, for a lot of languages, but they only added up to 3.1 megabytes total for everything.

Mike
 
I use a small free program called windirstat to scan my drive when I need to delete unwanted build ups. Give that a try, it shows a block chart with all data on the selected drive.
 
Good thread here. let us sort it out!

Any chance you can show us your folders in Windows, Mike, if not too confidential.
 
Not sure how much this will help with respect to this specific thread.
This is a clean install of Build 10056 from the ISO.
I've done no tweaking or cleanup of any kind. The relevant information is contained in the attached images.
Not a very big foot print at all actually.
 

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Hi

I tried Winderstat as Paul Simpson suggested.
By the way this is a great program, thanks Paul.

Here is what I found...

Drive%20C%20Stats_zpsdgmkbqz0.jpg


As you can see, the hiberfil.sys file is what's using the space.
It alone is 25.6 Gigabytes.

As I understand it this is the files that stores my computers status when it's told to sleep.

I guess that brings up the question, how can I make this file smaller?

What happens if I delete it, assuming that, that is possible?

PS. I ran a search for hiberfil.sys and found it int the root directory of C:\.
However it is not visible in Windows Explorer even though I have show hidden files and folders selected.

hiberfil%20sys_zpscvgymx6g.jpg


As you can see the specs for it show it as a 25 Gigabyte file.
So this does seem to be where all my space is being used.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I found some more information, it appears that the size of the hiberfil.sys file relates to the amount of ram you have on your computer, the more ram you have the bigger the size of the file.

My computer has 32 Gigabytes of ram, so that is apparently the reason that my Windows install is so large.

By default Windows makes the file big enough to hold everything that could be stored in you ram.

It seems that the only way to get rid of the file it by disabling hibernation, and I'm not sure that's a good idea in Windows 10 at this point, I see that in Windows 8 it can be done from the command prompt.

Since I can live with it the way it is, it's probably better for me not to mess with it.

Mike
 
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One of my first actions, when I install, is to disable the hibernate feature, particularly on builds. If anything crashes, it is easy enough to reinstall and, like yourself, I am always running a current image which can also be put back in a hurry.

Elevated command:

powercfg -h off
if it then makes you unhappy:

powercfg -h on
 
Hi Dave

OK, I did it and it reduced the size of my installation by 26 Gb, which will help with the size of image files.

I still don't know exactly why my Windows folder is so large (just under 30 Gb) but it must have to do with things that I have installed on other drives.

Normally I'd expect it to be fonts, but I haven't installed my fonts in Windows 10 so my fonts folder is only 550 Mb.
I wonder if I can analyse Windows using Winderstat, I'll look at that.

Mike

OK, you can break down the Windows folder...

Windows%20Folder%20Breakdown_zpsxymvq3tt.jpg


As you can see the biggest space hog is DriverStore at 8.5 gigabytes, and that has folders in it for a lot of languages. Maybe they aren't all supposed to be there?

Could this be because to the update glitch that downloaded all the language files?

I also noticed that my System Volume Information is about 8 gigabytes, that seems large too.
 
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Hello all and thanks for the excellent thread,

I seem to have a very similar problem Mike: the size of my DriverStore/FileRepository folder is through the roof at a whopping 43Gb:

upload_2015-4-23_11-3-16.png


There seems to be quite a few amd driver files in there. Is it safe to remove any of them? If yes, how can I identify which I should remove?

Thanks for your help!

All the best,

R.
 
Hi

I would like to know that too.
I don't know if it's safe to remove these files or not.

My Driver Store folder is 8.4 Gigabytes.

They are obviously in a lot of different languages.

Some people have Windows folders as small as 13 gigabytes or so and this is the largest folder in my Windows install.

I guess I'm going to do another clean installation, the thing is I don't think that my original install was a lot smaller then it is now.

I'm pretty sure that my original clean installation was at least 30 gigabytes for the C:\ drive to start with.

Can anyone tell me how big their System Volume information file is?
Mine is over 8 Gigabytes.

Mike
 
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Hi,

DriverStore: 7.11GB, 6.723 files in 737 directories
FileRepository: 7.11GB, 6.291 files in 732 directories
further more the directories en-US and nl-NL

Henk
 
Hi

OK, that's not a lot different then mine.
Yet some people have their entire Windows installation at round 13 Gigabytes.

How about the System Volume Information file, mine as I said is over 8 Gigabytes, that seem like a lot.
The Driver Store and System Volume Information alone totals about 17 Gigabytes?

Mike
 
Hi Mike.

Just discovered something on this thread subject.
My son, who is an IT expert, but doesn't get into Beta testing, decided to have a quick look at Windows 10, starting from scratch, in order to keep up with his customers.

He got as far as 041, with fresh installs from my ISOs, but then went on to install 061.
His driver store in 041 was less than 1GB, but, the same not phoned me with a "What the f.." His driver store has suddenly blown to 27GBS.
So I then decided to update mine, rather than a fresh install -It did the same to me.
Not much help to you, I know, but does explain the size of your installation.
I am currently querying how on earth even if you multiply by 2, 1GB can become 27gb ??? What are they putting in there?
I have read a suggestion that it is something to do with multiple languages.
 
Thanks for the additional info Dave, this actually helps to narrow down the origin of the issue, which seems to reside with a somehow bogus update. I'm now pondering whether to wait for the next one which may help solve it or clean install from a fresh ISO. :)
 
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