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Windows 10 is Eating My Hard Drive
Okay, long story short, I upgraded my Dell laptop from Windows 7 to Windows 10. So far, very few problems, nothing I haven't been able to fix. Except for one problem.
The free space on my hard drive keeps getting smaller and smaller. Something is eating up my hard drive space ever since the upgrade. I swear that after each boot up, I lose nearly a gig of space. I haven't been doing anything that intensive lately, mostly stuff on the internet. I use Chrome, not Edge, and I have cleared Chrome's temporary files and cache, but that was only around 300 MB. I do have some apps, like the Mail and Calendar app.
So, what's the deal here? My Google-fu is failing me miserably and I want my free hard drive space back.
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-Use the disc cleanup program and clean up system files. That was sometimes a few gigs that got eaten up
-I used to fiddle with some of the apps, like weather and news. Then one day I checked the size of the news app, and it was in the double digits. So that got thrown out right quick.
-The last one involved Intel's integrated video stuff. To keep it simple, suddenly I was having major issues with the virtual memory page file. I have Windows on a 100 gig SSD drive along with a 1 TB regular drive, and typically have 10-15 gigs free on the SSD. I'd be playing a game, and suddenly I'd get a warning of low memory, and the SSD would be down to 1 gig or less. Regardless of how much free space, the page file would eat the entire thing. I eventually traced the problem down to wonky drivers on Intel's front and installed a previous version, and it never happened again.
That was my first thought. If your restore points are not given a maximum space usage, they can balloon up. That should be automatic (up to a max of 9-10 GB usually), but it's worth checking.
I'd also try turning off fast boot. With SSDs especially, I've seen Win10 eat up that space for fast boot, but forget to free it up later.
Edit: the wife recommends checking file history, as well. If you were backing up to an external drive before, it's possible that the system decided to back up to the C: drive instead because reasons.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
I did the upgrade about 2-3 weeks ago. So I think I'm past the lengthy updates. That was actually the first thing I focus on when I upgrading was making sure the updates were installed right away.
I used disk cleanup as that was my first thought. There actually wasn't that much to clean out, which kind of surprised me.
Most of the apps seem okay. There are a couple that seem to taking up more space than I would expect and I'll want to look into, but that doesn't account for the loss of space I'm experiencing. Unless I'm looking at it wrong.
No idea about the drivers. I'll look closer at that as I didn't think about that.
Being an idiot, I don't have it doing auto backups, but the system restore is showing that it's taking up over 5 GB. That being said, system protection for the C: drive is set to 3% (17.44 GB). Recovery protection is off.
Fast startup was on. I just turned that off. We'll see if that helps.