Windows 10 Will Reserve 7GB of Your Computer's Storage in its Next Major Release So That Big Updates Don't Fail (zdnet.com)

In the next major release of Windows 10, Microsoft will reserve 7GB of your device's storage to resolve a Windows 10 bug thrown up by Windows Update not checking whether a PC has enough storage space before launching after big updates. From a report: As Microsoft warned ahead of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, systems that don't have enough space to install Microsoft's 'quality updates' or new versions of the OS will see an error message explaining there is insufficient storage space. That happens because Windows doesn't check if a device has enough space before initializing. Microsoft's current solution is for users to manually delete unnecessary temporary files and temporarily move important files like photos and videos to external storage devices to make enough space for the update. This problem is more acute for devices with little storage capacity, such as many of the cheap 32GB flash-drive PCs on the market today.

Comments

is that a way to disable updates?

[TheGratefulNet]

by manually ensuring that you don't have that 'required space' ?

I bet there will be nag dialogs endlessly until you 'let them' do an update to your system.

man, I hate win10. we are forced to use it at work but thankfully I can do 99% of my daily stuff with linux. those who must use win10 - I feel sorry for you. its not a fun experience having to be the 'operator' of a computer you don't really own anymore..

Re:is that a way to disable updates?

[ctilsie242]

It is funny how Windows 10 has differed from Windows 7 as time has gone by. For example, Windows 7 ran OK on a regular hard drive. Windows 10 -needs- a SSD to be able to function. The minimum size has grown as well, where W10 pretty much needs 120+ gigs of space with all the Market and user installed shoverware, and that's before adding relevant apps.

Maybe if Microsoft made this a whole new OS release, this would be understandable. They could set requirements where they could have a hidden partition with 20+ gigs tucked away for both recovery and updates. This also would make a reset/reinstall easier, as the entire C: filesystem could entirely be blown away, not just deleting c:\Users, program directories, and the Windows directory, ensuring that no malware is on the new filesystem. In addition when the machine is reinstalled or refreshed, all updates can be copied, so the machine doesn't need to go through multiple Windows update and reboot cycles to work.

Best of all would be having Windows be entirely hypervisor based, so a Windows desktop would be a VM, and a "reinstall" would just be starting, loading and provisioning a VM image. No fretting with bare metal.

Re:is that a way to disable updates?

[Freischutz]

by manually ensuring that you don't have that 'required space' ?

I bet there will be nag dialogs endlessly until you 'let them' do an update to your system.

man, I hate win10. we are forced to use it at work but thankfully I can do 99% of my daily stuff with linux. those who must use win10 - I feel sorry for you. its not a fun experience having to be the 'operator' of a computer you don't really own anymore..

To be fair that's a lose lose situation for Microsoft. Be aggressive about updates and the user is annoyed, let the users install updates at their own leisure and they get hopping mad when their computer is infected by malware because of an un-patched vulnerability they could have fixed by installing in a timely fashion the updates that they have been putting off installing for weeks. At least you're getting the damn updates.

Re:No they won't

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm Windows 7/Linux mix until Windows 7 runs out of support. After that is 100% Linux.

32gb flash drives?

[citylivin]

With SSD's being around $100 for a samsung 256gb drive, i doubt anyone is deploying less than 128 these days.

Who the hell would ship a computer with a 32gb ssd? windows itself needs that much to even install! much less run. 128gb has been too small for a few years now!

There are also some tricks you can use to free up space. One i learned recently will clean up the stupid windows installer directory pretty well. i personally freed up 40gb on my work machine.

Download the windows installer cleanup utility, then run MSIZAP.exe G! to clean the directory

If you get an error, delete all the registry keys under:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData

reference: http://wyang0.blogspot.com/201...

Wow, got a problem fix something else?

[kamakazi]

So Window Update doesn't check the size of the update and make sure there is enough space before downloading and installing it, so instead of fixing Windows Update we will just reserve 7G (SEVEN Gig!?!?! I had a full OS, and all of Microsoft Office, and my other software on a 105MB hard drive back in the day - but I digress) which will only be used when there is a major update instead of JUST FIXING WINDOWS UPDATE.

It is simple math. I realize with dynamic updates you probaby can't make an exact prediction of the space needed for the rollback repository etc., but you can know the actual update file sizes, and you can make a conservative guess on the in-process size, just check, if there isn't enough space don't even do the download. Nag the user about it all you want, just don't actualy start the process until you have room.

And if they actually need 7G now, what happens next year when the updates are bigger?

It's funny, I am sick of MacOS as they continue to de-Unix and get in my way with every update, so I am switching, but for some reason I never even considered switching to Windows.

Re:No they won't

[I-am-a-Banana]

This is 100% what is wrong with the Linux scene. Every year for as long as I can remember I hear 20xx is the year of the Linux desktop. But the Linux desktop is never that close....

Incremental updates are a lost art at Microsoft

[hackertourist]

Like the last time I needed to make a change to MS Office: I wanted to install a Czech language pack for MS Word. This should be a few MB worth of dictionary and hyphenation info. The Office installer proceeds to remove my entire MS Office installation, redownload 500 MB and reinstall the entire fucking Office suite. IIRC it nuked all my preferences too.
The icing on the cake was that it replaced the Start menu shortcuts for all Office programs with new versions in Czech, even though my system language is set to English.

Re: No they won't

[kenh]

So your mother is running a 10 year-old browser on a 10 year-old Linux kernel, on a 10 year-old PC?