Windows 10 question please.

[Petel]

Hello
Could anyone please advise as to the following?

I am hearing that people who have changed to Windows 10 are finding their hard drive
space filling up with updates. The claim is that whilst online, masses of updates are
being downloaded unseen in the background. I am told that some users have
reverted to their previous operating systems ( Windows 7 & 8 ) because of this.

I am also told, that this problem is being caused by Google Chrome, again
massive numbers of unseen updates filling up their hard drives.

If anyone has experience of this, could you please advise :-

1, Is this Windows 10 ?

2, Is this Google Chrome ?

3, Is this as a result of using Chrome loaded on Windows 10 ?

4, Is this just heresay ?

Thank you, Pete.

 

[MarkE19]

I use Windows 10 & Chrome as my default browser and have not noticed disk space being eaten up - but saying that I have about 6.5Tb of storage on my PC.

Disk space is cheap these days, even a 1Tb SSD can be had from under £100 so in most cases this should not be an issue. Of course if you have a cheap laptop with eMMC storage then many things can quickly fill these.

Mark.

 

[EndlessWaves]

Windows 10 does download updates in the background (as did previous versions), and Microsoft releases most updates as a batch once a month so it's normal behaviour for 'masses' of updates to be downloaded in the background all at once. Maybe a dozen or two on a big month, or 10-15GB for a major update.

It sounds like you're asking about an actual bug though. I only follow general tech news, but it haven't heard of any such major bug.

It's entirely possible that such a bug exists, or existed, under a specific set of circumstances but it's certainly not a general thing that affects all Windows 10 installs, or all those with google's chrome browser installed.

It's likely that if there was a bug at the origin of the reports you've been hearing that it's been compounded by other issues. For example in the last couple of years laptop manufacturers have been equipping their cheapest models with tiny amounts of flash storage rather than hard drives. The storage on them is only barely sufficient to allow windows to update and there are complaints from people who bought or were sold such a machine without realising just how little you can install/store on them before running out of space.

 

[DavidG1]

The only problems we find are cheap devices such as the HP stream fitted with 32 GB of eMMC storage running out of space as MarkE19 and Endlesswaves eluded to. As long as you opt for a reasonable amount of storage there are no problems. Additionally with the next spring Update, Microsoft is introducing “Reserved Storage,” which is a new feature that sets aside part of your device available storage to reduce problems upgrading to a new version or installing updates as a result of not enough space.
Reserved Storage will set aside around 7GB of storage for updates, temporary files, system cache, and apps. When a new update is available, Windows 10 will delete the files located in the reserved storage automatically to make room to install the update.

 

[Petel]

Many thanks to MarkE19, Endleswaves for your replies.

Thank you both and to DavidG1, it is now begining to make sense.
If MicroSoft are going to change their update procedure as you
describe, then they must have be aware that this was causing problems.

Very many thanks again.
Pete.

 

[EndlessWaves]

If MicroSoft are going to change their update procedure as you
describe, then they must have be aware that this was causing problems

I wouldn't have put it like that.

As Mark says, storage is cheap and the biggest windows update days have only required around 15GB. That's about £2 worth of storage, if that.

What's the cheapest Windows machine you can buy? £100 maybe? £2 is nothing, and we should be laughing at Microsoft for wasting development time on supporting this.

Unfortunately nobody's laughing because the alternative for people who buy those £100 machines isn't to spend £102, but to stop using windows altogether and go for a Chrome OS PC instead. And that impacts all of us because less users means program developers are less likely to develop Windows versions of their software.

So Microsoft are spending their time accommodating 32GB drives as if it's 1999 again.