Is 46 GB not enough free space to install Windows 10?

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Interesting question from reader A: It is not my intention to give you more work than you already have, but perhaps, you’d like to know this.   A frie
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My guess is that Windows 10 needs the space to set up virtual memory in order to give minimal performance. It sounds like an old computer with an old,slow processor. 100 GB is small these days for a hard drive. That is why I am guessing that it is an old computer, or a tablet with an under-powered processor, small hard drive and low memory.

I doubt that the USB solution would work unless it was formatted. Then Windows would have be told where to find it, and to put the virtual memory on it. I don’t know if you can do that when installing Windows 10.

Best solution(s) would be to buy a bigger hard drive or a new computer (then he/she wouldn’t have to install Windows 10 him/herself). More RAM might help as well.

But because of the scarcity of facts about the computer, I am guessing. Did it pass the Windows 10 compatibility test? How much RAM does it have?

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On reflection, I realize that the problem has little, if anything to do with virtual memory.

Windows installation files are usually CAB files which are compressed. These need to be uncompressed, and directories created for them during the installation process. Also, the whole Windows 7 filesystem would be preserved in case of roll-back. So while there would probably be enough disc space after installation when the CAB and other files and their directories are deleted, there won’t be enough during installation.

Therefore, my original prescription is correct:
a new hard drive or a new computer.

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Not necessarily old…

Our office workstation PCs are all less than 2 years old but have 100GB SSD drives as the local drive (as users mostly use the document management system and network drives for profile file location.

When I work on my home PC, I always keep the OS/C: partition as small as possible, after all, it’s only supposed to hold the OS. I install all apps (and all other data) into a separate partition, that way, if apps grow unexpectedly or I install too much crap, I don’t accidentally fill the C: drive and crash the system. Keeping the OS partition to a minimum also ensures you can easily keep track of unusual file growth that may be a sign that you have some unexpected system behaviour. (Plus 100GB SSDs are perfect as a boot partition/drive.)

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Although frankly, the prospect is frightening. We have really gotten to the point where you can’t install your OS on the space available that fits on a BLU-RAY DISK???

Apps bloatware is one thing, but when the base OS requires this much space to even get set up, we’ve crossed a line.

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I’m afraid I do not agree with you.
My own harddisk C partition was about 65 GB and had about 8 GB free space left prior to installation. There were no problems whatsoever.
I have 12GB RAM and my friend’s 8GB.

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I think there’s a different problem at work here. Not sure what.

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We need more information: complete system specs.
Otherwise, we’re just guessing.
I still say get a new hard drive. Perhaps there are problems with the old hard drive, bad sectors perhaps. Would require hard drive diagnostics on site.

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I just heard back from the person who sent this to me. Apparently the owner of the system is quite ill, and won’t be upgrading to Win10. I think that’s a very good decision.

The mystery continues.

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@Allan: To gather complete system specs on any Windows OS based PC, run either Microsoft System Information tool (msinfo32.exe) or DirectX Diagnostic tool (dxdiag.exe).

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It also depends on what type of Windows 10 installation the original person intends to do. Assuming it’s a 64bit OS and not a 32bit OS, an “upgrade” install of Win10 requires much more hard drive space than normally desired (which backs up previous Windows OS files) while a “clean” install of Win10 (overwriting the previous version of Windows) just needs perhaps less than 20Gb of free hard drive space.

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The same happened to me. I had more than enough space, but Windows 10 deleted my previous version (8.1) anyway. I think it’s intentional so you can’t revert back because I still had problems getting rid of Windows 10 even when I did a system restore from Symantec System Recovery.

Windows 10 obviously had files hidden on other partitions. The only solution was to reformat the hard drive, repartition the system drive (because Windows 10 rearranged everything), then reinstall Windows 8.1. It also took about a week to finally get rid of it.

While reinstalling Windows 8.1, I did get a popup about Windows 10 which I ignored.

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