Switch 10 hard drive is full

tchalm

Acer Switch 10, 2 GB RAM and 32 GB "hard drive".

Windows 8.1 Pro

"Hard drive" is full.

I have looked for files to delete, but have not found any "low hanging fruit".

I have tried to uninstall programs that I don't need, but the uninstaller can't run because the hard drive is full.

I'm thinking that if I added an SD card, I could move the pagefile there, then maybe the uninstaller would run.

Would the system automatically use it additional hard drive space?

 

Does anyone have any other ideas for me?

Thanks!

TC

tchalm

Well... I put in an SD card and re-configured the pagefile to move from the "hard drive" to the SD card. However, after rebooting, Win8.1 wouldn't use the new pagefile and built it's own small pagefile on the C drive.

 

So, I thought that maybe the SD card needed to be formatted as NTFS. Then I configured the Pagefile on it again. Unfortunately, the Switch 10 has been Restarting for an hour.

 

What was Acer thinking? Windows grows larger every month with the Windows Updates. If it ever boots again, I'll look for ways to reduce the size of the Windows Update files - I haven't had to do that on a Win8 machine, yet.

 

All I've got on there is the standard Windows 8.1, which I upgraded to Pro so that I could run Bitlocker to encrypt the hard drive.

 

Uninstalling the Games and junkware doesn't help much.

 

Any other ideas?

IronFly

already tried a Disk cleanup checking system files?
windows logo key
type
disk cleanup
click on disk cleanup
click on Clean up system files
let it scan
then tick the files you want to delete, it's safe to do it
at the end press ok and let it clean the HDD for you

padgett

Have you turned hibernate off and removed HIBERFIL.SYS ? That is usually a couple of GB. Then you can move files to the SD card.

 

See here.

 

 

tchalm

The pagefile will not run on the SD card.

Disk cleanup found a couple MB to remove - not much.

Hiberfil did not exist; there was no evidence that Hibernation has been enabled.

But after uninstalling the "store" apps, all of the Acer apps, and doing a couple more restarts, I was able to uninstall Foxit PDF Reader, Malwarebytes and all of it's files, Firefox, Chrome, and MS Office.

In other words, it's pretty useless now.

But now it has about 1 GB free - enough to run the timeclock software that this thing was intended to do.

 

However, it's just going to get filled up again, so I'm going to have to replace it = soon.

 

What was Acer thinking in selling a Windows system with only 32GB of hard drive?

 

Or what was I thinking in buying it? Obviously, I wasn't.

 

Is there a way to cleanup Win8.1 updates that keep piling on?

 

Thanks again!

billsey

Take a good look at c:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download. That holds copies of all updates that have been applied as well as any ready to be applied. It can often have mutiple GB in it, and everythiing can be safely removed.

tchalm

So I learned something new - I'll put it here so I can find it again.

 

To clean up the Windows Updates mess:

Windows Key + r

Type cleanmgr.exe to start Disk Cleanup (other methods get to the same point - take your pick.)

When Disk Cleanup gets thru it's first scanning phase, click on the Clean up System files button.

It will scan again, this time looking for the Windows Updates files.

When it comes back with the list, if you check the box to clean up the Windows Update files, then click OK to go ahead with the cleanup, it will automatically do a restart, which on this unit took an hour or so.

The downside to cleaning up Windows Update files is that if you want to uninstall any of the updates, you need to install them again.

 

After running the Windows Updates cleanup, the c:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution folder was nearly empty.