HP Stream laptop no disk space

[jpda65]

My stream laptop is only six months old and for about the last four months, i have no spare disk space at all. i get constant notifications of low disk space. i store all of my files (photos, documents etc) on a USB memory stick. there is not even enough space to install the latest version of windows. I cannot even do a system restore because of insufficient disk space. i feel that i have been conned into buying an almost usless product. i've done disk cleans and defragements so many times but it makes no difference

[Huffer]

Defrag is not going to do anything. Disk clean is only so useful. Yes these 32 gig Streams are a challenge. I have worked up a tutorial on how to get the latest Windows 10 Build on it and some other software and only use up about half the space but it requres a reinstall from the Microsoft Media creation tool site and some pretty deep settings being tweaked and compression of the storage. If interested I can post it here. 

[jpda65]

thank you for your reply. yes, please give me the solution! i'm not the most tech-savvy person but i will give it a good go

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

This last Saturday I decided to go out and see if I could locate one of these things for cheap and try it myself and see what happens. I went to our local Best Buy. I bought as laptop with a Celeron processor 10 inch screen 2 gigs RAM and the dreaded 32 gig eMMC storage drive. Came with Windows 10 Home preinstalled. 

Out of the box the hard drive had 10 gigs of data on it. I then proceeded to do all the Windows updates and when I got to updating to Build 1803 got this:

no space 

So I backed up the desktop background and the original drivers to a thumb drive and went to the Microsoft Media Creation tool site and downloaded an .iso of Build 1803. Using an usb DVD drive I installed fresh Windows 10 wiping all the preexisting partitions and letting the installer make all new ones. You could also make a thumb drive instead of a DVD drive.

Immediately after install the drive held about 15 gigs of data. I then used the "Compact OS' command to compress the drive. You open an elevated command prompt and type:

Compact.exe /CompactOS:always

Takes a few minutes, reboot and you are down to 10 gigs used out of 28 or so. 

I then turned off hibernation and set the swap file to be a constant 1 gig rather than the default 2 gigs the system was using and turned off system restore services. 

set swap to constant 1 gig

Because of the weak processor and 2 gigs memory on this model I also set visual effects to "best performance". This model had a free one year Office 365 license so I had saved off the Key Code and installed fresh from the Office 365 website using the Key Code. Lastly I installed CCleaner, Malwarebytes and Avast Free. 

When all is said and done I had the latest Windows 10 version plus Office 365 plus security apps running in about 12.9 gigs of space. 

hard drive only half full with programs

I then turned off automatic Windows 10 and Office 365 updates. The laptop is actually fairly useable and now there is enough available space to store some documents and pictures. I plan to add a 16 gig micro SD card and move the Music, Downloads, Documents, etc. folder to it to make sure future use does not fill up the hard drive. 

For those users who are threatening to abandon HP because their sub-$200 laptop is not working as they say they were told it would I offer this option. I actually have seen people saying they bought one of these to run a business or use for college. 

Let me know if there are questions. 

[jpda65]

Thank you very much. I will wade my way through this in the next day or so. I'll get back to you if I have any problems.

[wister]

Great summary!  I have a slightly older stream with Win 8.1.   Will I be able to start on Win 10 from the USB per this workflow or I  will have to somehow upgrade in-place first?  I have saved off the Win 8 product key but not sure it will take when starting up on Win 10.

Alternatively to the Win10 path, I'd be happy to stay on Win 8.1, but really need to wipe out that recovery partition which is taking 7G or over half the unused disk space.   It seems locked in several different ways, is there a good way to blow away that partition and merge it to the main partition?  I can do recovery from a USB.