In regards to the thread topic, my Win7 machines usually have a \Windows folder size around 21GB and a \winsxs of around 9.5GB. This is thanks to UpdatePack7 which only uses a curated list of Windows updates and uninstalls the malicious / unnecessary ones.
Windows 11 filling hard drives
- Thread starter OVERKILL
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I never thought I would either. I'm appalled that I made it through 2025.
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What else would you expect?
Even Win10, system sitting idle for hours and HDD churns continuously all night long with log files and who knows what else AND internet communication. And this is writing to SSD continuously.
The whole SSD thing is a trap, they only hold data for so long. Forget about turning on a PC that was on shelf for 10 or more years.
All disposable ****e just like cell phones.
I still have over a dozen XP boxes. Best OS if you actually want to do something.
Even Win10, system sitting idle for hours and HDD churns continuously all night long with log files and who knows what else AND internet communication. And this is writing to SSD continuously.
The whole SSD thing is a trap, they only hold data for so long. Forget about turning on a PC that was on shelf for 10 or more years.
All disposable ****e just like cell phones.
I still have over a dozen XP boxes. Best OS if you actually want to do something.
That was actually my plan, but I talked myself out of it since it would be single drive dual boot. I wanted to just jump in with both feet, but I may talk myself back into dual booting just to get onto Linux.
Thanks for the tip on turning off the Windows 11 Telemetry. Will try it tonight on my daughter’s Windows 11 gaming desktop.You can turn most of this off using winutil:
https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
This isn't a Windows 11 concern, this is a Microsoft Office one. You could of course block this with firewall rules, but if you are using Office365 and Microsoft's cloud products, you aren't getting around it.
This could be related to updates or #1.
I've never experienced that on any of the hardware I've installed it on
That's going to depend entirely on what the game is, whether it's running through an emulator or compatibility layer (Wine for example) and of course if it even runs. There are plenty of games that do not run or do not run reliably on Linux using compatibility software through Steam for example. Getting the game to start (often the benchmark used to say a game is "compatible" or "works") is not the same as it being able to run reliably.
That's not really an option for business environments, which is where the computers the OP is about are located. A lot of software is Microsoft-only.
I've been using Unix and its variants/off-shoots since the early 90's, even installed FreeBSD on my 486 using a boot floppy over dial-up around 1995, but there are some applications that they simply just don't work for.
I'm entertaining a Rocky desktop to run Davinci Resolve natively.
I'm no distro expert but:
If you are new to Linux and want a solid LTS that is easy to learn on, Mint.
If you are a little bit savvy and want the oldest and most stable/secure, admittedly not bleeding edge, Debian.
I distro hopped in the early years and landed on Mint twenty years ago. Moved to Debian fifteen years ago and been there since.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've had far more HDDs fail than SSDs. But, I only buy SSDs from Samsung and SKhynix.
I don't make my purchase decisions based on offline storage length.
I think that post was a rant with no creditable information. SSDs have double the lifecycle for computers.
OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
The OS not to fill the drive and the "garbage collection" feature to actually work? But this IS Microsoft....
I mean, this doesn't have to be a guess, you could log what it does, this isn't difficult. Windows 10 telemetry is far less than what 11 does. It does do lots of maintenance tasks when it's idle, which you can find in task scheduler if you want to go looking. It also tries to do updates during this time as well. So yes, it's doing stuff, but it's not nefarious.
SSD's are not a trap, that's silly. They aren't archival storage and have never been presented as such. CD's and DVD's also degrade with time, that's why they sold/sell specific archival grade versions. Tapes of course are probably the most common medium.
For their intended purpose, SSD's are fantastic, massively faster than spinning disks, without the latency or vulnerability to shock damage, and a lifespan that will typically outlast whatever they are fitted to.
Not if that involves being secure on the internet, running a modern browser, gaming, or accounting. Most companies dropped XP support ages ago, heck some vendors are dropping 10 support now and requiring 11.
Unless the task is specialized legacy software, Linux is a vastly superior choice to XP and will still be able to run most of the same software with WINE or similar (or in a secured VM).
OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
Well, got ANOTHER one today! Friend of mine, used to work at the dealership, has an HP ProDesk w/256GB SSD, Windows folder is 172GB.
126GB of .dmp files in the Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Local\Temp folder.
126GB of .dmp files in the Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Local\Temp folder.
Had one yesterday... client reaches out, their ~2 year old Windows 11 system with a ~500GB SSD has only 5GB of disk space left.
"System and reserved files" was using almost 200GB of space, which is absurd.
She is a bookkeeper/CPA and mostly works in Adobe Acrobat and QuickBooks. This will matter in a moment, bear with me...
Anyway, I run WinDirStat and the Windows/Installer directory is using almost 70GB of space! I look in there and it's a bunch of msi files, some small ones but many at least 1GB of size! Viewing properties on those files showed that some of the smaller ones were from QuickBooks but the majority of them were from Adobe.
Turns out every time QuickBooks and Adobe Acrobat updates they download the new installer versions into that folder. QuickBooks deletes most of the files except for maybe the last few minor updates, but Adobe NEVER deletes any of its files! How dumb is that!
A quick Grok search led me to PatchCleaner. Despite being about 10 years old it still works just fine. We created a system restore point just in case, then we moved all the "orphaned" files to a temporary directory we created on an external hard drive. After testing Acrobat and QuickBooks everything works fine so we removed those temporary files.
So all is well now. But isn't it crazy that Adobe doesn't have some logic to remove old update files after it's done? I can understand saving the last 2-3 versions just in case the update fails but storing every single one forever? That's dumb!
"System and reserved files" was using almost 200GB of space, which is absurd.
She is a bookkeeper/CPA and mostly works in Adobe Acrobat and QuickBooks. This will matter in a moment, bear with me...
Anyway, I run WinDirStat and the Windows/Installer directory is using almost 70GB of space! I look in there and it's a bunch of msi files, some small ones but many at least 1GB of size! Viewing properties on those files showed that some of the smaller ones were from QuickBooks but the majority of them were from Adobe.
Turns out every time QuickBooks and Adobe Acrobat updates they download the new installer versions into that folder. QuickBooks deletes most of the files except for maybe the last few minor updates, but Adobe NEVER deletes any of its files! How dumb is that!
A quick Grok search led me to PatchCleaner. Despite being about 10 years old it still works just fine. We created a system restore point just in case, then we moved all the "orphaned" files to a temporary directory we created on an external hard drive. After testing Acrobat and QuickBooks everything works fine so we removed those temporary files.
So all is well now. But isn't it crazy that Adobe doesn't have some logic to remove old update files after it's done? I can understand saving the last 2-3 versions just in case the update fails but storing every single one forever? That's dumb!
OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
How big is the Windows directory now? Because if only 70GB was freed up, I'd go searching for the same .dmp files I've now found on multiple systems.
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