After installing Windows 10 on a friends’ computer, I thought it was time to upgrade my own. My primary concern was my limited available space on my C-drive (I have two more drives with plenty of space). I tried to find good advice or information online, but no luck, so here is my report:
Upgrading Windows 7 to Windows 10: storage requirements
My Windows 7 computer had a C-drive with the following available capacity:
12.6 of 55.3 GB Free (after running disk cleanup).
That is, Windows and some programs were installed on C, most files on other drives. Anyway, Windows 7 was pretty eager to upgrade, and I started the procedure.
- It was “Checking requirements” (3 times, different dialogues)
- Downloading: available space down to 9.4GB
- Preparing for installation: down to 8,1GB
So far it had been the typical low-quality MS experience of different dialogs giving quite dull information and no real sense of progress, but now it got really bad:
The f**k is this? I did not know anything about installing the Insider Preview (there has never been any pre-release W7 whatsoever on this computer). And “something needing my attention”, being thrown back from the Windows 10 upgrade wizard to the Windows 7 system upgrade, not very impressive. Anyway, I just clicked “check your PC”, the Windows 10 upgrade continued, and I got this:
This is really crap! It had already checked requirements three different times, yet not figured out I had too little space. I could have told it, before it even started, that I probably had too little space. The good thing however was that I could pick another drive to use for extra space, and I happened to have an internal drive available.
After that, up to 10.5Gb availble space on my C-drive, and restart. Now my computer was working on its own for almost an hour. After that Windows 10 came up, and everything seemed fine.
With Windows 10, I now have 17.8GB free space on my C-drive. That was nice! Perhaps a reason in its own to upgrade to Windows 10.
Conclusion: upgrading to Windows 10 with limited available space on C is a good idea, but make sure to have an extra external (or internal) drive for the process itself.