Windows 10 takes less disk space than 7?

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  1. Posts : 248
    Windows 10 Pro
       #1

    Windows 10 takes less disk space than 7?


    I installed Windows 10 and despite there being a 5 GB windows.old folder, the C: drive has about 10 GB free that it didn't before the installation (accounting for the installation files which otherwise would have made it 15 GB). What is Windows 10 doing so differently that saves all that space?
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  2. Posts : 487
       #2

    Microsoft wrote a blog post about the reduced footprint last year, which should give you more info.

    You can have a read through it here:
    https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexp...act-footprint/
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  3. Posts : 248
    Windows 10 Pro
    Thread Starter
       #3

    Thanks. I guess they cleaned up some other stuff as well.
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  4. Posts : 1,524
    Windows 10 Pro (32-bit) 16299.15
       #4

    I upgraded a Windows 7 laptop the other day. Before the upgrade, windows 7 had a folder with all the installed updates since whenever it was installed, which took more than 10GB. This was deleted from Windows.old and Windows 10 took less space when installed. So overall I saved disk space.

    Going forward, because Windows 10 is doing a full OS install every 6 month or so with its update, it shouldn't build up the huge stack of updates which Windows 7 had.
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  5. Posts : 137
    Win10
       #5

    I noticed this as well. My 1TB HDD was nearly full so I moved my music collection to a portable HD freeing up 350GB leaving my HDD with ~650GB used. I then did a clean install of Win10 64B and MS Office to a new SSD and transferred all my documents and files to a new 2TB HDD. Interestingly I am only using a little less than 200GB for my docs and files. Win10 on SSD is considerably faster than Win7 was on HDD which makes me wonder is I didn't have a bunch of corrupted system files or something taking up all the space. Anti malware Bytes and SFC never reported issues in Win7. No clue?
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  6. Posts : 12
    Windows 10 Pro
       #6

    This is an old topic, but I'd be interested to know if people still find Windows 10 economical with disk space? My recent clean install of Win10_1909_English_x32.iso to HD using WintoHDD left 11GB free, but a few days later after only one Quality Update, the free space was already down to 7.1GB despite running Disk Cleanup and deleting everything it said wasn't needed. The Windows directory is now 13GB and for comparison, another of my machines runs XP for which the Windows directory is only 3.78GB; is this really progress...?
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  7. Posts : 4,511
    several
       #7

    Seems to have changed. Ther is another thread where people are struggling with devices that have only 32gb sd cards.
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  8. Posts : 2,487
    Windows 10 Home, 64-bit
       #8

    Brian111 said:
    is this really progress...?
    I don't know if it's progress, but I'd say it's inevitable.

    The big jump in disk space used by Windows was from XP to Vista.

    Here's some examples from my records of C partition space occupied. The installed applications were pretty much unchanged:

    XP as of 2008: 10.5

    Vista as of 2009: 28.5

    Win 7 later in 2009: 19.6

    Win 7 in 2017, just before switching to Win 10: 41.7

    Win 10 in 2017: 27.2

    Win 10 right now: 34.0; note: it has recently varied between 37 and 44; this 34.0 is the lowest I've seen it since 2017.
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  9. Posts : 31,463
    10 Home x64 (22H2) (10 Pro on 2nd pc)
       #9

    Brian111 said:
    This is an old topic, but I'd be interested to know if people still find Windows 10 economical with disk space?
    My test machine (System Two in my specs below) has system images of all versions or W10 plus its original W7. All the W10 images were derived by upgrading from the original W7 install. It's Windows folder for the latest Windows 10 1909 is 2.7GB smaller than the original W7 install. Both installs have had Disk Clean up run to remove windows updates backups so should be as small as possible.

    Windows 10 takes less disk space than 7?-size-comparison-w10-vs-w7.png
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  10. Posts : 12
    Windows 10 Pro
       #10

    Ah! I knew Vista was unpopular and buggy, but I hadn't realised it also included a massive jump in disk occupancy. I guess it doesn't really matter unless you want to use some of your disk for your own stuff, or until there's not enough space for Windows, even if you clear everything else off...
    Does anyone know why the size of the Windows directory grow so fast a day or so after a clean install?
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