Windows 10 has more than doubled in size since 2015

[Jcmg62]

Makes you wonder what they're sticking in Windows 10 these days.

According to a July 2015 article in Forbes, the Windows 10 download was about 6GB, however, that wasn't my experience with the OS. I distinctly recall it ate up 11 GB of hard drive space when I originally downloaded it on my machine back in August 2015.

But now...what the heck are they putting in the stew pot back at the Redmond cookhouse?

I noticed over the weekend that my laptop hard drive has nearly 60GB of data on it.

I have an SD card in my machine and never save data to the hard drive.

After running a quick system clean (which didn't make much of a difference), I hopped into settings and had a look over the storage page.

I was pretty surprised to see that the OS has swelled to nearly 23GB!

This isn't an "end of days" problem for me, as my machine has a 256GB hard drive, but it has got me thinking about where Windows 10 is heading.

What's caused this huge bulge in OS size? Are people actually using an additional 10-12GB of new features in Windows 10? And how big is Windows 10, compared to Chrome and MAC OS?

At the rate it's growing, Windows 10 is only a couple of updates away from being too big to run on a 32GB device. And that could be a problem for OEM's that may want to use the Surface Go form factor as a starting point to build lower-end W10 tablets for the consumer space.

Maybe it's time for MS to start thinking about a smarter way to deliver feature updates.

For example, with every Redstone update, maybe they should send a message through the update system saying "hey, here's a list of new features we've created in this update that you can add to your machine. Tick the boxes of the ones you want and we'll install them."

Should we be concerned about how big Windows 10 is becoming?

 

[ochhanz]

Iirc I read somewhere that are working on making the features more like modules needed for some devices and not needed for others. My guess would be that they first want to put all the features in Windows 10 and let it be tested & patched and than switch to a more modular system when its ready (for tablet & handheld devices). All speculating of course.
I don't think we should be concerned how big it is getting since previously there were times when Windows was quite big (and later on reduced in size again etc).

 

[anon(5327127)]

The winsxs folder
The hibernation file
The virtual memory file
The latest Windows 10 build

It all takes up space.

if you purchased a 32Gb device it will, by now, be full. The windows install as well as the latest update will fill the drive. Basically never, ever, EVER, buy a device with 32Gb. Even 64Gb is getting tight. But then again people buy 16Gb iPads and they also fill up.

"Should we be concerned about how big Windows 10 is becoming?"
Nah. People like new and shiny things even if they don't use the new features.