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Win10 Updates - Not enough Disk Space

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325 views 6 replies 2 participants last post by  bobc 
#1 ·
My wife has a Lenovo Laptop with only 27.1 GB Internal Hard Disk Capacity. She uses this in conjunction with an external hard drive of many TB capacity on which she stores all her text and graphical data. The only applications that she has installed on the c:\drive are LibreOffice, Dropbox and Firefox. She has only 769MB of free space left but this is not a problem in everyday use. The problem arises when Win 10 decides to do an update as there is not enough disk space on the c:\Drive to accomplish this. The update download is directed to the external hard drive and completes satisfactorily and the installation proceeds as far as 17% before the updates requires an additional 5GB of space on the c:\Drive. The Win 10 prompt at this point suggests that the external hard drive can still be used to complete the installation but nonetheless the "next" step still looks for space on the c:\Drive. Needless to say, my wife has not updated the operating system on this laptop for some considerable time now (with no obvious problems arising).

Is there a way to complete the installation from the external hard drive? Does it really matter if she does not update the Win10 operating system?

Current c:\ folder capacities are:
$windows.~BT 346 MB
Program Files .97 GB
Program Files (X86) 3.49 GB
Temp 2.49 MB
Users 1.01 GB
Windows 21.3 GB
Windows10 upgrade 19.9 MB
 
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#2 ·
If one does not keep Windows 10 up to date one is exposing oneself to all sorts of security risks. One of the driving factors for Windows As A Service was the need for rapid turnaround with updates due to constantly evolving information about potential security compromises.

You also do not mention what Version and Build the machine is currently running. All Windows 10 versions available to "the general public" (as opposed to large businesses and institutions) are supported for 18 months from the date of release. You do not ever want to be running an out of support OS, whether Windows 10 or not, on a system that's being used daily and has contact with cyberspace.

The situation you're facing is becoming increasingly common on lower end hardware that came with limited internal storage space. The article, How to install a Windows 10 update when you don't have enough free space, on WindowsCentral should get you through the process.
 
#3 ·
Thanks for the link Brian. I will try that when time permits. I guess I will first have to borrow another win10 computer as I am still using my tried and tested win7 laptop. I am going to assume that your suggested solution works and therefore will mark this post as solved. Thanks again.
 
#4 ·
Well, my parting piece of advice to you is to do a full system image and separate user data backups on that "tried and tested win7 laptop" and promptly upgrade it to Windows 10 using the instructions in the pinned topic,
Windows 10 Repair Install or Feature Update Using the ISO.

The technique is precisely the same for doing an upgrade from Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 from within those operating systems using the above documented method.

Windows 7 goes out of support in precisely 2 months, and from the indications I'm seeing I suspect that Microsoft is actually going to turn off the tap for upgrades at no cost as soon as that date hits. Even if you were to want to keep using Windows 7, you could restore from the system image backup but will have secured a Windows 10 license for that machine that can be reactivated at any point in time that you wish.

Using any unsupported OS, but particularly any unsupported version of Windows, is a path down which lies madness!
 
#5 ·
Thanks for your concern. I have another laptop with win 10 on it (currently receiving a motherboard repair) and my old win 7 is system imaged with regular data backups. I am not a fan of win 10 and will stick with the win 7 for its current purpose.

It is perhaps interesting to note that despite all the "advances" in Microsoft operating systems, I can still accomplish all that I NEED to do on an old 3.1. Other than games and graphics, most of the "old" applications are sufficient for most peoples needs.
 
#6 ·
I guess it depends on how one defines "needs."

One of my signature quotes, in rotation, is:

A lot of what appears to be progress is just so much technological rococo.
~ Bill Gray

And I firmly believe that. That being said, concerns for security in the Windows-based PC world, which is the most popular and profitable arena for nefarious players of myriad sorts, are not to be brushed off and a huge number of things in OS updates/evolving center around tightening security.

I have an XP laptop and a Win7 laptop, both of which are not able to be upgraded. The XP box has some ancient software that's still of very occasional use but has not been allowed to venture anywhere near to cyberspace for years now. The same will be true of the Windows 7 box after January 20th. I fully expect a huge flush of hacking efforts on Windows 7 in the months following support being dropped, as anything found a an exploitable vulnerability will be and remain "easy pickins." Then, as time continues to march on, that will die down since there will be virtually no "high value" targets that still use Windows 7. I mean, when's the last time anyone heard of a major attack against Win XP? That's not because same could not easily be accomplished, but there's no real payoff of any substantial worth anymore. Very few nefarious actors are in it "for the fun of it," but because they want to make a buck one way or another.
 
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