Clean Installation of Four HP Pavilion 15 Notebooks a la Shawn Brink.

Thanks to Shawn Brink for his excellent tutorial on clean installing Windows 10.

I have four HP Pavilion Laptops which had 8, 7, 7 & 6 partitions as installed by HP, believe it or not.

Now all have the necessary four partitions and all are working perfectly.

However...

When I had finished I see that, although all four machines have identical software installed, that the size of the installation on the fourth machine is 2.3GB smaller.

I.E. 16.4GB - 16.3GB - 16.4Gb and only 14.1GB on #4

Programs such as disk explorer do not reveal anything, and Clean Manager makes no difference either.

Nor does removing all shadow copies in Device Manager.

There are no Windows.old folders on the drives.

When using Ashampoo GmbH WinOptimizer15 undelete on the Recycle Bin I find thousands of unrecoverable (bad) or lost files.

E.G. #4 shows 10,803 files amounting to 1.80GB

Intriguing as #4 had been restored from the (now deleted) Recovery partition, first to the original OEM Windows 8 and then upgraded to Windows 10 v1803.

Just a guess but has this Windows 8 to Windows 10 procedure cleaned out old metadata from the C:\ drive, whereas the 'clean' Windows install has, maybe, left something on the drive, despite all the partitions having been deleted before the Windows 10 installation procedure automatically produced the four new partitions?

Guessing again, but might it have been better to delete all the partitions as instructed and then make a single C:\ drive solely for the purpose of full formatting it, and then deleting it again ready for the Windows 10 installation?

The 2.3GB difference has me intrigued.

Why is this?

E.G. C:\Directory , AppData, assembly\temp , SoftwareDistribution and Temp\PendingRenames, etc.

#1. 9,491 items - 1.64GB
#2. 5,884 items - 717.35MB
#3. 9,137 items - 791.77MB
#4. 10,803 items - 1.80GB

Any heads up on this would be very interesting, as I am no expert by any means.

Many thanks,

Ian

Intel i3 2.4GHz processors, 1000GB Seagate HDDs

"... I find thousands of unrecoverable (bad) or lost files."
Your disk may be dying and it produces (bad) or lost files.
Schedule a disk check (chkdsk c: /f). Reboot.
Pay attention on the results. If it finds bad clusters or bad blocks, replace your HDD ASAP. I suggest to replace with a SSD.

Found a link to a program called Folder size and installed on all four computers.

Immediately found that the #4 machine did not have a hyberfil.sys file.

Removed the three exactly 2.3GB hyberfil.sys files from the other machines.

Checkdisk [chkdsk /f /r /x] started from a command window using the recovery option, ran overnight on all four machines and gave all four a clean bill of health.

Thanks for your reply and apologies for wasting your time.

As to why just the one machine had no hyberfil.sys file I'll never know.

They should have scrapped hibernation years ago IMO.

The command is>powercfg.exe -h off + ENTER and a re-boot.

Where h is the hibernation file.

Well done.
I have a desktop that I also removed hibernation (powercfg.exe -h off).
On a laptop it is very important that you stop the disk (unless you have a SSD) before moving it, as HDD are very sensitive to movements out of the rotating plane.

Thanks,

Totally agree on the question of SSD vs HDD.

My i7 desktop has an SSD. I use it for flight simulation.

The four HP Notebooks belong to an old people's retirement home and are used by younger family members when visiting their relatives.

I did ask, but they won't spend any money on SSDs.

I have set them up to shut down and never to sleep or hibernate as I found one still running in its bag and quite warm. They hadn't switched the mouse off either.

Ian