Windows 10 is a growing behemoth

[readymix]

Decided to check on my scheduled backups for the first time in a long time.(macrium) Holy Cow, up by 10 GB on the full since early 2016. I find C:\windows\system32\driverstore stuffed to 24 GB. hmmm, i guess this a rant only. How big is it going to get?

on another ridiculous note, i noticed my 4pm incremental produced 7 files, none the same size. otherwise everything else seems great.

 

[XavierMace]

I've got winsxs folders on Server 2k8 boxes at clients that's over 40Gb. Bloat is a "normal" part of Windows. I haven't found Win 10 to be anything special in that regards and just common sense will tell you the newer OS is going to have more built in drivers to support the newer hardware.

 

[boomerang]

C:\windows\system32\driverstore on my laptop is 1.35 GB. Which makes me think the OP is referring to the size of that folder in his Macrium backup.

 

[quikah]

driverstore will vary based on what you have installed in your system. I know on my desktop it is pretty huge, like 10+GB, I looked at it and there are several Nvidia drivers that are 500+MB each. I haven't tried it, but I believe you should be able to delete them following this

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc730875(v=ws.11).aspx

or there is a utility here:

https://github.com/lostindark/DriverStoreExplorer

 

[Dahak]

I've got winsxs folders on Server 2k8 b.....

well winsxs is a special case. it tends to be reported larger than normal on everything from Win7 and up

But yea, if its 40GB on the filesystem for the driverstore something is up, if its in his backup then may need to check the settings or if they are incrementals, dedup probably

 

[readymix]

Hit with the routine in the second post and another Dism/sxs from 10forums- http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...-minutes/3f97f6c9-08ec-4523-ae50-9889026ff723
Wiped it all to zero. Seemed harmless overall except for fingerprint lock screen issues. Ran ESD save everything and it dumped 14GB back in. F it

 

[bbhaag]

driverstore will vary based on what you have installed in your system. I know on my desktop it is pretty huge, like 10+GB, I looked at it and there are several Nvidia drivers that are 500+MB each. I haven't tried it, but I believe you should be able to delete them following this

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc730875(v=ws.11).aspx

or there is a utility here:

https://github.com/lostindark/DriverStoreExplorer

Thanks for the link to technet. I freed up just over two gig by deleting old drivers. Very cool and I will definitely be looking at this from now on.

 

[pcslookout]

Hard drive space is cheap.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Hard drive space is cheap.

Less so on a smaller boot SSD, though.

 

[mindless1]

^ Make a full partition backup on cheap HDD space. Delete all that clutter windoze builds up. If you deleted too much you have the backup. If you didn't, you just gained several GB of SSD space. Same goes for software installation file stores.

Then again a low end modern 240GB SSD can now be had for around $55 and everyone knows that software keeps getting more and more bloated so the move to Win10 was in itself a choice to bear that burden.

Don't even get me started about MS Office... 95% of what I use it for could be done on Office '97 portable word and excel which take up a whopping 31MB total, except opening those !@#$ xlsx and docx files people send me, without jumping through hoops to do it. Obviously MS is not the only perpetrator, I don't feel that a video driver needs to be multi-100MB either, or a dozens of MB network adapter driver?!

Regardless, if deleting all that clutter doesn't break anything, your future OS partition backups get a lot smaller too, small enough to fit on an inexpensive bootable USB flash drive instead of HDD.

 

[escrow4]

Less so on a smaller boot SSD, though.

Everyone should have a 500GB SSD by now at least. They are not that expensive.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Everyone should have a 500GB SSD by now at least. They are not that expensive.

Sure, you can send me one, or several.

But seriously, I have plenty of room to download Linux ISOs on a 128GB SSD, running Win7 or Win10, nevermind the 240/256GB SSDs that I prefer.

I reserve the 500GB-class SSDs for laptops, that don't have any additional storage bays. With a desktop with a 256GB SSD, I can just throw in a 1TB HDD, if I really need storage space. Or maybe another SSD.

Edit: Another way to look at it is, for a boot SSD, you want performance, not necessarily capacity. For builk storage, you want capacity, and not necessarily top-of-the-line performance.

So, that generally means, a 512GB Samsung 950 Pro for a boot drive, and one or several Mushkin 1TB Reactor SSDs, when they go on sale for little more than $200.

In my rigs, though, my desktops all have 128/256GB-class SSDs, nothing larger.

 

[JimmiG]

Everyone should have a 500GB SSD by now at least. They are not that expensive.

40 GB out of a 500 GB SSD is quite a lot, though. Windows bloat only really stops becoming an issue when you go above 2 - 3 TB on your boot drive.

 

[mindless1]

I had a 128GB boot drive and just left it to that role when I bought larger SSDs for same system, don't see the point of putting more static things like apps on the OS drive, just makes my more frequent OS partition backups larger. So long as it has enough free space that pagefile and browser cache aren't write cycle wearing it too much, I'm fine with that, yet could put those somewhere else too and may get around to it someday, or maybe not.

 

[Rifter]

Hard drive space is cheap.

People still using HDD's for their boot drives are even cheaper.