I had to "Restore/Recover" a new copy of Windows 10 Pro on a new hard drive as the original drive crashed and was totally dead. This was on a newer Dell I7 machine using a Dell OEM Restore/Recovery DVD. The actual DVD restore took over two hours. When the restore was completed, the machine automatically connected to my wireless network to get the latest and greatest Microsoft updates. All it wanted from me was the network password. I walked away from the machine while this process was going on. It took an additional 24 hours to get everything up to date. When this process was complete I got a congratulatory message on the machine's display. How thoughtful. After more than a day I wanted to see how big this mother was. So, I ran a Windows Defender "Complete Virus Scan" just for chuckles. After six more hours, I got my answer. A new install of Windows 10 Professional, Dell OEM Edition is comprised of over 2,250,000 modules. Unbelievable! But those are the numbers.

Nice that they include documentation describing what each of those module do....

I've been thinking about upgrading to Win 10 Pro from Home Addition just to get remote desktop.

After reading this, I think I'll pass. It would be nice to access my PC from my Android devices remotely but I don't want to invite instillation issues.

Speaking of, does anybody have this ability? If so, how well does it work?

Jim

consider switching to Linux

quote:

Originally posted by nhtagmember:
consider switching to Linux

I'll look into that.

It is the multiple updates that were done after you restored that are soaking up a lot of space. If you run drive cleanup and delete system files you can recover quite a bit of the space back. It can take hours on a slower machine with a hard disk.

Open My Computer
Right click on drive C and select properties
Select Disk Cleanup

It will run it's thing for a while when give you a screen.

Select clean up system files.

It will do it's thing again and bring you to the same screen as before.

Select More Options from the top
Under System Restore and Shadow Options select Clean up.

This will bring you back to the previous screen. Make sure all the boxes are checked and make sure you scroll down to get to all the boxes. Then select Delete. This may take a while.

That should recover the space you used doing multiple updates. Next time you reboot Windows it may take a little longer to finish cleaning up.

After you get your computer all cleaned up I would suggest you Clone your hard drive. Hard drives are now cheap enough to keep 2 or 3 clones on hand and with a USB to SATA adapter and Acronis True Image software you can have an exact bootable duplicate of your hard drive as it sit's right now. BTW, anytime you want to create a new clone on an existing clone you will have to start the process by Formatting the drive you want to write a new clone on.

By doing this anytime you have a drive fail all you need to do is plug in the latest clone and start the computer. There will be some time involved in getting up to date in regards to updates but since that is typically automatic you can go wash the car, take the dog for a walk, or hit the golf course for 9 holes.

^^^ +1 on Acronis. I use it constantly at my business. Just bought 6 new computers the same model. Setup one with a fresh installation with only the programs I wanted on it and our corporate antivirus and all out printers setup. Then I just clone that hard drive and copy it to all the other machines. Saves lots of time setting up each computer.

At home I make an image when I do a fresh install but also run backups weekly. Some to internal hard drives, some to servers, and some to removable USB drives. I also keep all my data on a separate drive so it is really easy to reinstall if I have to.

quote:

Originally posted by Scooter123:
After you get your computer all cleaned up I would suggest you Clone your hard drive. Hard drives are now cheap enough to keep 2 or 3 clones on hand and with a USB to SATA adapter and Acronis True Image software you can have an exact bootable duplicate of your hard drive as it sit's right now. BTW, anytime you want to create a new clone on an existing clone you will have to start the process by Formatting the drive you want to write a new clone on.

By doing this anytime you have a drive fail all you need to do is plug in the latest clone and start the computer. There will be some time involved in getting up to date in regards to updates but since that is typically automatic you can go wash the car, take the dog for a walk, or hit the golf course for 9 holes.

^^^This, but take it a step further. Install your operating system and all application hardware on a separate drive (preferably an SSD) than your data files are stored on (which can be a HDD). Then use Acronis to create ongoing separate backup images of 'both' drives. That way you can restore whatever you need to in short order. And doing it that way insures you'll be restoring a fully updated Win10 operating system, so no updating issues/delays.

As mentioned previously, HDD's are dirt cheap so you can buy and install a third HDD (~4/6TB) as the backup drive for your images. Heck, I do 'complete' images of both my operating system and data drives weekly, and end up with six months of restore points. Of course that third internal HDD is also backed up once a week (after the images are done) to an external 6TB backup drive, until my NAS is completed and installed.

Restoring a drive needn't be a painful process if you plan and do your backups properly.

Doing a switch to SoldState Drive and online reference says 20 gb for w7 or w10.

Still downloading all the updates and I'm up to 26 gbs for w10. I partition a space of 40gb for it.

I'm set up to have w7 and w10 still functional on this ssd and w7 went down first and its around 40gb.

Don't know why ms would say such a low space amount.