I used to have disk space…
I mentioned a few days ago the insanity of when 32GB was no longer enough for a simple Windows 10 Professional install with nothing else on the hard drive. My week thus far has consisted of getting phone calls from users who have run out of disk space on their drives that a month or two ago had 100+ gigs of space free.
In each case I’ve gotten a call that they’re out of disk space and can’t print. One was Windows was keeping 70 gigs of windows.old and a staging directory. Eh, no big. One the Windows Store had died and now the app spent its days running 25% processor and making 8 megabyte memory dump files until the drive filled up. And another is daily attempting to install something that’s about a gigabyte taken in the appdata\temp folders.
All of these issues are Windows 10 specific.
In my building we’ve got a 230 gigabyte SSD setup with Windows 10 Pro, Chrome, and MAS-200 (a whopping not a gigabyte) and that’s it. It’s full, Windows Store crashes and writes about a gigabyte an hour. Process can’t be stopped, changing the group policy no longer works unless you’re enterprise. had to kill it.
There’s the simple file server setup, 32 gigs for the OS partition, all apps stored on extern al drives. Nope, can’t install an update as the drive filled up. Had to use a USB stick for space.
I got the familiar call this morning. This is a BYOD machine I have nothing to do with except occasionally fixing it, as I did today. The temp files were in a different location, but the issues were the same. For some reason Windows Disk Cleanup could not handle the appdata\temp, had to run through with a DEL *.* /S /Q with admin permission. Somewhere in the neighborhood of a million files.
I got the error message I was out of disk space on my home machine today… have not had a chance to look at that.
We’ve been talking about moving a department off of Windows 10 and virtualizing their workstations so we can just re-roll the station in a minute as opposed to spending 10 minutes diagnosing and deleting every couple of months. Besides the out of disk space issues we’ve fairly regularly had installs take two or more hours. Two year old machine, 32 gigs of ram, SSD, two hours.
Windows has been a bit of a mess lately. Give your IT guy some extra Red Bull.
Mate most of these problems sound like the result of misconfiguration or poor choices.
1st of all there’s absolutely no reason why an enterprise machine should have only 32 GB of primary storage. That’s poor hardware selection. Besides that the 32 GB limitation has been known for some time. It’s also been known that the minimum practical Windows 10 system drive size is 128 GB.
Again, poor IT practice. Ideally your machines should be set to delete installation files after an update.
Resetting Windows Store via PowerShell is easy.
Sounds like a user app update. Not exactly a great mystery.
Pro is NOT intended for enterprise environments. It’s always been the SKU for consumers who want more features. This is basic IT knowledge.
Whoever set this up should be fired. This is flat out incompetence. Either that or you need a bigger budget.
Based on the series of terrible decisions in the article, I’m guessing also that whoever selected the woefully small SSDs also elected to move the user profile folders to a bigger physical HDD, a configuration MSFT not only strongly recommends *against* but which their documentation says KOs the Windows Store. Lo and behold that’s exactly what you’re experiencing.
Your department’s just terrible at its job, dude. This has nothing to do with Windows.