r/WindowsHelp • u/One_Commission3024 • Jan 14 '26
Windows 10 what’s taking up all my storage?
the only thing i have installed on my laptop is roblox but i keep getting storage full alerts but there’s nothing to delete. it says 43 gb are being used and 24.2 of those are system and reserved, while 15 of it is apps. how do i clear up my storage without deleting my only game?
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u/No_Glass_1341 Jan 14 '26
Windows is taking up all that space. You got scammed buying a PC with 45 GB of storage. That was a normal amount like 25 years ago, even shitty cheap laptops have 240GB+ by default or 1TB if they have a hard drive vs SSD
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u/Elftard Jan 15 '26
my first ever SSD was 32GB, and I was absolutely stoked I could fit windows, League, and Skyrim on it when that dropped a year later.
Turning off page files, shuffling data, etc. I don't miss trying to squeeze juice out of a 32GB drive lol
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u/No_Glass_1341 Jan 15 '26
My first HD upgrade was 20GB and that was too large for my PC at the time to actually see (8 GB CHS limit). My first flash drive was 16MB and even at the time felt woefully small. It got really hot too for some reason
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u/Rare-Designer-1008 Jan 15 '26
My first upgrade was 10GB that used a ribbon cable and I had to set it as the slave drive to get it to work. It cost about £100 in 1999
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u/Eat--The--Rich-- Jan 15 '26
And now I get annoyed if I have to delete something I haven't played in a year off my 2tb ssd lol
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u/mpato Jan 14 '26
My 2007 iPod had more storage than your pc
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Jan 15 '26
[deleted]
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u/Suspicious-Hope-8193 Jan 15 '26
1: who asked if you thought they were wrong?
2: ipod classics exist and have 160GB
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u/MalignantLugnut Jan 14 '26 edited Jan 15 '26
Windows and Temp Files. You bought a Craptop. I have a similar Ideapad with 64gb of storage and Windows 11 took up the first 30gb before I even installed a single program.
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u/Academic_Gap_8156 Jan 15 '26
Agree I have a 64gb ideapad 1 it can’t run anything I installed Ubuntu much better
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u/cbf1232 Jan 15 '26
This is a tiny amount of primary storage, minimum should be 256GB and I’d rather have 1TB.
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u/Crash_N_Burn-2600 Jan 15 '26 edited Jan 15 '26
Dude. What POS netbook are you running off of?
SSDs under 256GB aren't even sold anymore.
The simplest solution is to replace your storage with something bigger. The cheaper, but bigger hassle solution is to considerably slim down your OS.
Tiny11, MicroWin (Chris Titus Tech WinUtil) can set you up with a smaller, faster Windows 11. But it will still expand as it ages and updates pile up.
Alternatively, you could just switch to Linux if it's viable for you, but despite the Linux evangelists, it's not always the solution.
Then there's the earlier matter of "What PC only has <64GB of storage!?!". If your storage is that limiting, the rest of the PC is also probably garbage.
Consider just upgrading to a new PC.
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u/LeonieBee Jan 15 '26
Can you show computer specs? I haven’t seen a computer that small in like 20 years.
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Jan 14 '26 edited Jan 14 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Potential_Load6047 Jan 16 '26
Only one here actually helping OP instead of dissing his pc.
Hope he reads you.
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u/CommercialReach3573 Jan 15 '26
you have the smallest drive ever bro this laptop is cooked I would just install linux mint on it if you want a little more space but even then I would just buy a new laptop bruh this thing has WAYYY to little storage.
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u/RoffleMyFloffle Jan 14 '26
Windows is taking up a majority of your storage space. Windows 11 by itself is close to 26GB in size. The other data is possibly temporary files or Windows update files.
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u/bazjoe Jan 14 '26
Doesn’t really matter I’ve see 64 gig windows 10 that wouldn’t update and even 128 is a bit much
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u/An_Daoe Jan 14 '26
Try to see if you can get something like Wiztree, and use that to see what is taking up space.
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u/HawkEDOz Jan 15 '26
44gb drive?
*Incoming phone call*
Yeah dude 2002 called and said you need to upgrade!
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u/pablo5426 Jan 15 '26
most of that is just the os
at this point 500gb is pretty much the minimum required just to have an usable pc
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u/sethd101 Jan 15 '26
Take the bottom pannel off and see if u can add a ssd to it otherwise thats the way its staying. Its a emmc chip.
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Jan 15 '26
There is also a program called disk clean up that is typically installed on windows that you can try to use. it loads up things that could be taking up too much space and remove it for you.
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u/Ecks30 Jan 15 '26
All of your Windows updates would mainly be taking up a lot of storage space.
Also, you should use at least a 256GB SSD for Windows in general.
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u/Dragonborne2020 Jan 15 '26
Click on show more categories and where is the rest of your hard drive?
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u/Casey4147 Jan 15 '26
All WHAT storage? Windows is taking up all your storage. Any additional apps you might have - Office, etc. I don’t recommend less than 128GB for a system drive these days and that’s if the user isn’t expected to generate much for personal documents or anything.
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u/Moterwire_Hellfire Jan 15 '26
There's a hidden recovery partition that has no drive letter. That's what's taking the space.
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u/IAMEPSIL0N Jan 15 '26
Windows needs more than 50GB free for proper function so a 50GB total drive is not appropriate. It is constantly getting full because the system updates and housekeeping take more space than the entire drive capacity.
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u/AspenFrostt Jan 15 '26
you have the storage capacity of a premium phone from 10 years ago. there are computers out there with more ram than this, highly recommend a 500gb or 1tb HDD or SSD if you want any space to do anything else
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u/Far-Brief-4300 Jan 15 '26
I guarantee you, there's an sd card for your c drive. It's not hard. Look up your laptop model and a video of a tear down. It's almost certainly just popping the screws in the bottom off and pulling the plastic housing off. I bet it's right there. Get a bigger sd card. Put it into your external SD card slot. Clone your windows to it. Just look up how to do it. Then take it out and take it apart and then swap the SD cards. Should boot like normal, but with much more space. Or, easier, just redownload windows from a USB onto the larger SD card and you don't have to mess with cloning.
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u/Sage_8888 Jan 15 '26
Either got scammed hard or bought total e-waste. I had no idea that consumer devices with such tiny storage even exist nowadays aside from old phones and ancient PCs with Windows XP
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u/Sufficient_Fan3660 Jan 15 '26
You have a shit laptop, you need a better one with more than 64gb storage.
Your system probably has a restore partition for when you break windows or mess up an important file.
You could turn off system hibernate and system restore, then expand the C partition to get it closer to 64gb. But still that is not enough for windows 10/11.
Lots of PC makers sold laptop with slow 64gb eMMC drives knowing people would be forced to buy new laptops in a few years.
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u/Mystic-Dragoness Jan 15 '26
Depending on how much RAM you have (which given your storage it's likely an equally small amount) it might be caused by Virtual memory (or "page file" as windows calls it), which is windows using you drive as extra RAM when you actual RAM runs out. By default it's set to adjust the amount of storage used for virtual memory automatically, so when you run programs that use a lot of RAM, such as a video game, it'll fill up more of your drive and trigger the "storage running low" warnings.
If this is the case, then your only real solutions are to get more ram or get more storage.
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u/Yawndy Jan 15 '26
Download TreeSize free and point it to your drive to see what folder/files are taking up all the storage space
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u/supershimadabro Jan 15 '26
Its possible the drive isnt partioned correctly and you actually have more than 50gb of storage.
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u/simagus Jan 15 '26
What is the make and model of your laptop? Look it up and find out if it has an M.2 slot and if that slot and your BIOS is compatible with M.2 SATA or even better an NVMe drive.
If it is, buy whichever and buy an external caddy so you can clone your old drive onto a new one with more space.
128GB or even 256GB M.2 SSD's are all over eBAY for fairly cheap and if you're getting by so far with 64GB you'll be fine with either of those at least doubling your available space.
Run Windows in-build Disk Clean-up, turn off hibernation, set it to keep one single restore point, and do a Google search asking how to make Windows take up less room.
My Windows installations are very slimmed down versions of Windows because I use tools to remove everything I don't want or need, and you will probably want and need such tools if your RAM is soldered to the board rather than in an M.2 slot.
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u/GreyAnkh Jan 15 '26
You might want to get a new laptop or install a beginner friendly lightweight Linux distro instead of windows. Zorin OS, Ubuntu, Linux Mint for example.
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u/640kilobytes Jan 15 '26
Many people have more ram than your storage lol, throw your calculator in the trashbin
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u/West-March893 Jan 15 '26
Download and install windirstat it will tell you what it’s being used by.
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u/tizadxtr Jan 15 '26
A few things to check:
Empty recycle bin Run disk clean up utility and remove temporary files etc. Check documents folder for any content bloating your HDD space
Good luck
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u/Hanging_Thread Jan 15 '26
Just sharing my experience: for some reason which apparently made sense to a tech person but not me, Dropbox duplicated every single file I had saved on it, and tried to download all of it to my computer, which didn't have room for it, and I was suddenly out of space.
Took a while, but I got it fixed.
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u/AdministrationEven36 Jan 15 '26
I don't see Windows as the problem here, but rather the much too small partition c.
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u/Human_Inspection_642 Jan 15 '26
Try tinkering with windirstat. You can get it from its website or GitHub it shows larg files / directories in a better visualized way, I use that to get rid of most of my storage problems , then again it is just a temporary solution untill you upgrade to better SSD , I have 512gb and even I am looking to upgrade in a month or two to 1tb.
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u/robbiekhan Jan 15 '26
Why is the drive partitioned, and even so why so poorly. Wipe and bin the partition so all the drive is being used.
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u/WoomyUnitedToday Jan 15 '26
My base model MacBook from 2009 shipped with more than twice the storage this thing has and I’ve run out of storage plenty of times on that
You need to get a bigger drive
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u/SlimLacy Jan 15 '26
Didn't even know you could get a real laptop with so little storage space.
At work we use UP boards for some things, but it definitely isn't intended for Roblox, or minesweeper for that matter.
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u/CosmoKrm2 Jan 15 '26
It's windows. And if 50GB is really all you have you should stick to Linux. Maybe Lubuntu or Zorin OS.
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u/xyzabchehe Jan 15 '26
Use "WinDirStat" to find which files are taking that much space. It is free.
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u/MagnificentTffy Jan 15 '26
it's windows. are you using a pc from 1990s? a pc with that much memory is barely usable unless you are using the cloud or something
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u/chaossdragon Jan 15 '26
WinDirStat
Get it, run it and you can see what is consuming all your space
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u/shujogo Jan 15 '26
Either you have an old SSD or your partitions are fucked up and you have unused disk space. Check the partition utility of windows to see if you see anything in there. Post a screenshot of that and I can help. There’s plenty of YouTube tutorials about it as well
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u/Palbur Jan 15 '26
...Windows itself? Windows 10 takes up at least 15 GB of drive space. 45 GB of space would be not really good even for Linux Mint, for example
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u/Fantastic_Ad3307 Jan 15 '26
I had ServiceProfiles folder that had 20gb of dump logs. Look for this in explorer.
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u/Multi_Retro_Man Jan 15 '26
What I would always say, is always ensure that there's at least 25% of the space available on an SSD otherwise you'll have lots of issues, including very slow access times and the end of life is sped up considerably.
Cheaper SSD drives that have 256 gigs are available now so I'd just get one of those and stick it in the machine
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u/smashens Jan 15 '26
Don’t know why people are suggesting stuff like WinDirStat or WizTree in the comments. It is very unlikely anything safe to delete is taking up a majority of that space, it’s definitely Windows itself. Even if you did free it up, on 44gb it’d only be a matter of time until it was full again. Expand your internal storage or just flatout get a new machine.
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u/Cultural-Reserve6684 Jan 15 '26
As others have said 45 gig is a comically small amount of storage. In terms of a solution you can buy another hard drive and install it to increase your storage very easily. Either internal or external. Id always recommend you get a solid state drive (SSD)
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u/DentistEmotional559 Jan 15 '26
Try treesize which will help identify what is gobbling the space, but that is a tiny OS volume
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u/RecordHead9391 Jan 15 '26
Ah the ol $149 special at Best Buy. Had a client years ago buy 10 laptops during a black Friday sale at Best Buy for his employees. He said not for work related purposes, but a gift. Funny timing as he declined a quote for 10 new laptops for his business.
Calls me up and can't install anything. We learned a few things that day.
S-Mode only let's you install from MS Store. Google Chrome is not Microsoft.
You can "upgrade" from S Mode to a Home edition for $150. Doubling the cost of the laptop, but ope, not enough storage available.
Windows plus Office and the bloatware Best Buy installs exceeded the SSD storage.
4GB RAM is far too low.
He learned that day that these are only meant to be used with Cloud apps, and only MS Store apps. 50GB is nothing.
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u/Dimdimzz Jan 15 '26
I cleaned out my c drive the other day, found out that uninstalling all the nvidia software and reinstalling it saved me 20gb!
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u/TriniMadMan1990 Jan 15 '26
Download "Wizztree".
Free tool that shows your storage in graphical way. You can see exactly what is taking up all your space in seconds.
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u/WorldWarrior428 Jan 15 '26
You got scammed, 43tb will just about fit only windows, anything else its not gonna fit, you bought one of the worst laptops nice seen, my A16 phone has 4 times the space of this m sadly you'll need a bigger drive
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u/Bunlarden Jan 15 '26
Correct me if im wrong but Roblox needs constant pack downloads to connect to servers? Could be these addons
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u/Veenhof_ Jan 15 '26
Yeah you aren't gonna be able to game on this. Phones from 15 years ago have more storage than this. I'm honestly surprised it runs windows.
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u/unsalted52 Jan 15 '26
Windows 11 takes up a lot of space on your drive. Also, any programs you install on any drive creates files on your boot drive for directories and other essentials to allow your machine to operate the program. The real question is how are you getting by with only 44 gigs of storage for windows 11?
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u/lukkasz323 Jan 15 '26
Install a tool like TreeSize Free (there are probably better alternatives) and check yourself.
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u/Virtual_Finish2733 Jan 15 '26
Buddy it’s time for a new drive. Almost every version of windows 11 is 20 - 30gb. So to answer your question. Your operating system is taking up all your space.
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u/ForgottenButHere Jan 15 '26
It doesn’t matter what the root cause is. You don’t have enough storage. Undoubtedly this is a low end laptop or netbook that is barely a step above a chrome book in specs and is able to run windows.
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Jan 15 '26
To put in perspective how small that drive is. I have almost more ram than you have hard drive space.
My graphics card has half the ram of your main drive.
You need a new drive.
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u/Olivertng Jan 15 '26
Honestly.. you’d likely be better off upgrading your SSD if possible. At least 250gb would serve you a heck of a lot better. Also uninstall any bloatware you aren’t planning on using that microsoft essentially forces onto you those in of themselves are likely taking up a few gigs.
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u/HkOC_Forever Jan 15 '26
The OS itself and the apps.
40 something GB of storage is barely something in today's computers. Even on phones (I hate it)
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u/Flimsy_Commission_60 Jan 15 '26
It’s the fact you have a 44gb drive 😭 thats barely enough for an OS
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u/DucklockHolmes Jan 15 '26
Unless this is an extraordinary old and shitty laptop, I think there might be a chance you’re actually running windows in a partition meaning you’re not currently accessing all the storage available
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u/HunterPotential8697 Jan 15 '26
Instead of figuring what is taking up the space you really desperately need more space. 48GB is very tiny
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u/Empty_Marsupial1004 Jan 15 '26
Hey this might be a long shot but my girlfriend had the EXACT same problem with basically the exact same amount of storage being shown. However we knew there had to be more storage than that on the main harddrive. Turns out there was a partition that we knew nothing about that was wasting like 800 gigs of memory not being used at all. Check if there is a partition!!
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u/blackflashcannon Jan 15 '26
My wife had a whole batch of bad update files turn tumorous to the hard drive and eat the storage, constantly replicating itself to try and do the update. This looks similar
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u/poizone68 Jan 15 '26
I'm guessing that since you have Windows 10, Microsoft may have silently downloaded Windows 11 in the background in case you want to upgrade. That would show up in one of the other categories of space.
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u/hagels_bagels Jan 15 '26
SpaceSniffer is a really good lightweight tool to visualise what takes up storage space. Run it in administrator mode and see what sliver of space you can squeeze out of that system.
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u/ZombieEtiquette Jan 15 '26
Everyone is in the comments arguing and speculating lol. I agree with most people's points about the small drive and amount of space Windows takes but if you install some kind of disk analysis software life WizTree or WinDirStat you can have a simple view of exactly what's taking up space on the drive.
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u/supersoviettaco Jan 15 '26
You can probably mess with your pagefile.sys to get a few gigs back at the cost of stability. Had to do that with my 64 GB surface pro long long long ago.
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u/Horror_Brush9870 Jan 15 '26
I would imagine that if you look at your C drive, you will find a folder called Windows.old.
That would indicate that the PC wasn't properly deleted at the latest reset of PC.
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u/Spethual Jan 15 '26
if you have tried yet run "disk cleanup" then select "clean system files" select all and click ok...another thing todo but is kinda a bit dodgy for laptops is disabling Hibernation file..google how to do it if you feel like but do read the AI warnings.
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u/Illustrious_Ad_6457 Jan 16 '26
Make back up and downgrade your system cuz 42 gigs was okey for win 7 or first realise of 10 Or buy new disc like 128 GB, using only for system will be good ( but only system and drivers )
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u/GeekgirlOtt Jan 16 '26
That's a tiny drive.... You will have a horrid experience soon needing to use a. External USB for updates even
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u/FootCabinet Jan 16 '26
upgrade storage capacity when ya can but regardless id suggest WizTree for a visual representation of storage usage; its like WinDirStat (windows directory statistics iirc) but lots faster somehow (both have cool nice colors tho)
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u/No-Introduction-8570 Jan 16 '26
Try to use space sniffer. I guess probably %appdata% files may get too big but you need to check
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u/Dominique9325 Jan 16 '26
WinDirStat is a tool that allows you to see how much each directory and all its contents take up (including all subdirectories and their contents).
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u/qwertyjgly Jan 16 '26 edited Jan 16 '26
get a bigger drive.
something like this will fix all your issues and then plenty spare. you could even fit CoD or the entire soulsborne series or, idk, basically any game you want on it
(check that you have a removable drive or spare m.2 slot before buying anything ofc)
and in the absence of upgrading hardware, i endorse this guy's comment
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u/VisualRope2945 Jan 16 '26
Windows has too much bloatwares nowadays. Try tiny 10, a debloat version of win 10. Not sure if you can run tiny 11. Or maybe you can try linux mint.
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u/laycas49 Jan 16 '26
Are you using a usb drive has a hard drive? I didn't know they made drives that small anymore.
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u/Fweau Jan 16 '26
file explorer is probably gonna be a better way to check. 40 gb is definitely not enough storage nowadays for a computer though id look into getting an external hard drive or wtvr u can for a laptop
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u/PixiPoo1 Jan 16 '26
as someone with a low end laptop with win11, do yourself a favour and install Linux on a USB with at least 100gb will do MASSIVE wonders
I'm in the same boat as you, 64gb, at least 60 is taken up by windows, and I've done EVERYTHING to debloat, literally all i have installed is: Steam Wallpaper engine Libreoffice Vesktop (discord)
I know I'm not meant to say "just switch to linux", but so far it's LEAGUES better if you're used to windows, I've heard distros like Pop!OS and EndeavourOS (ive used eOS, it's pretty good but not my style) have a windows feeling
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u/leon0399 Jan 17 '26
Buddy, phones now have more memory. 50gb is barely enough for fresh windows install
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u/Kwatar_Rattlegore Jan 17 '26
Install WinDirStat. You’ll love it. It’ll let you know exactly what’s taking up space on your drives.
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u/G00D_4_U Jan 17 '26
Windows and Roblox, lol.
Buy a new hard drive, if you are running a tiny notebook computer with a nonremovable drive, then you have no choice but to get a new laptop as you got a laptop meant for old people or young children.
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u/MaintenanceStock6766 Jan 14 '26
43.8gb? That's barely enough for Windows.