HP Stream Computer (if you can call it that)

[targetrasp]

A coworker handed me his daughter's laptop saying that it ran really slow. Looking into it the thing only has a 32 gb hdd (meaning under 30 useable) and runs windows 10, and came with office 365.

Windows 10 ver 1703 can get to 24 GB (windows 10 says minimum space 20 gb) + 1 gb for office + hp bloat and you're looking at 27ish gigs of drive space used...

Disk clean up saved about 500 mb of space and the computer still wanted almost 3 gigs worth of space before it would let me reset the pc both from windows or from hitting escape after turning the computer on.

Still not enough space to do anything... This time I ran disk clean up in an elevated command prompt and there was the option to select windows update, which was good for 16 gigs...

I'm guessing that streamlines (for lack of better term) the winsxs file at the cost of not being able to revert to past versions and / or kills restore points?
I tried it, and it ran for a while but would never finish. It seemed too good to be true!


Any windows gurus know a good way to gain some space? HDD is integrated on the board and this thing is almost netbook sized, meaning there's no easy upgrading. (that's a lie, i can remove the wireless nic to free up a pcie slot that could potentially house an ssd - all at a cost that would not be justified when weighed against the value of the device.

There's no docs, pics, movies, applications (outside of office, and minecraft - which combined is just over a gig) and everything that's usually stored on a hdd isn't here, apparently the user is a firm believer in the cloud.

[BLUEVOODU]

@targetrasp a couple quick wins -  check the paging space and spacing file. See what you can reduce there.


Also look into the hibernation file.  There are ways to get rid of that.   They tend to be gigantic. 

Look forward any Windows features that can be uninstalled.

32GB is not much space for anything Windows.... Except for windows servers... that's not so hard. But I know it can be done -  you are very limited and your computer will never stop telling you that you're running low. 

[CreepinDeth]

I would uninstall Office and just use the web apps if this person is all about the cloud. Seems you've done all you can and it might be time to go into expandable storage.

Does this laptop have an SD Card slot? That could be one way to expand storage to house music, pictures, etc. If there are USB slots, they can look into using portable apps that run off of a USB drive. [PortableApps.com]

[CreepinDeth]

If you go the portable apps route, you can use Windirstat and have it analyze the HD. It will tell you what files are taking up the most space. It's very handy.

[BLUEVOODU]

If you go the portable apps route, you can use Windirstat and have it analyze the HD. It will tell you what files are taking up the most space. It's very handy.

windirstat is great..

Also... good call on using cloud office.   THOUGH I am not a fan.  It flakes out - and editing stuff is kind of laggy.   This was at work.

So ... I haven't had the best of experiences with it.

[CreepinDeth]

That's fair. I guess it would depend on the usage. If it's for critical work stuff, then I would probably recommend google docs over the web versions of Office. If it's for just writing simple papers and/or spreadsheets, it should be okay.

I was also going to throw out ReadyBoost as a suggestion but I believe it has an SSD in it already so it wouldn't benefit.