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- Updating Windows 10 OS on an HP Stream with 32 GB eMMC memor...
I had earlier posted a journal of my experiences with a Lenovo laptop having a 32 gig eMMC and attempts to update it from Windows 10 Build 1709 to 1803, where so many users were running into limited storage issues. Here is that post reproduced with some minor edits:
We have had a lot of posts on here for months now from Users who purchased HP Stream and similar laptops with 32 gig eMMC storage disks and Windows 10. They are sometimes called Cloudbooks. I just had a user tell me he had contacted HP Support, Microsoft support and multiple local computer technicians all of whom told him the computer is useless and cannot be made to work. I cannot accept that. 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. They had no Stream or any other HP laptop with a 32 gig eMMC. They did have a Lenovo 10 inch laptop very similar to a Stream that had been discounted down to $130. When I asked the sales person about it she first tried to talk me out of buying it but when she heard what I intended to do with it she confided in me that Best Buy has told its floor people to talk customers out of these machines as they are also getting a lot of heat from them. She flat told me "you will not be able to upgrade it and it will very quickly become unuseable".
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 room
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.
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.
setting swap file 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.
available space
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.
So much for the Lenovo Cloudbook. I donated it to charity and flash forward about a year I wanted to revisit and see how the situation has evolved. These Cloudbooks continue to be offered and we continue to get reports of mass dissasatisfaction with the product. So this time I did find an HP Stream 14 inch model in shocking neon purple color:
And a couple more pictures of the machine and identification decal on the bottom:
This laptop came with Windows 10 64 bit in S mode Build 1803. So it was already at the level we struggled to get to on the Lenovo.
As with the Lenovo, this model came with a year subscription to Office 365 for free (a very good deal for a $200 +/- laptop) which I installed and activated in addition to Avast Free, CCleaner, and Malwarebytes as well as Adobe Reader. Windows 10 gave me the option to turn off "S" mode and allow installation of apps from sources other than the Microsoft Store, and I gladly accepted so no longer in S mode.
Then I simply went to the Microsoft Media Creation Tool site (google it that way and you will find it) and downloaded Build 1809 aka October 2018 Update, selecting upgrade now:
The Update went through but left the purple Cloudbook with very little storage: it would be basically useless at this point:
I checked whether it would be possible at this point to compress the OS as I did above with the Lenovo but HP ships these with the OS already compressed:
So I simply used the Disk Cleanup with the Clean Up System files option to remove the old Windows files:
Make sure to select the options to clean up files from the prior version of the OS.
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-delete-the-windows-old-folder-from-windows-10/
You can also manually check to see if the update storage file is empty:
Windows 10 stores its upgrade files in C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download
Thanks to @erico for that tip.
You can also set the paging file at a static amount. By default the paging files was set to use up to 2 gigs. I chose 768 megs (freeing up 1.2 gigs permanently) as this laptop has 4 gigs of RAM (most Cloudbooks have 2) and does not need quite as much paging:
And as I did on the Lenovo I set the Windows effects to best performance as these units tend to have budget processors and struggle to handle any kind of multitasking so do not need to be bogged down with Windows visual effects:
When all is said and done there are 11+ gigs of free space after updating to 1809, installing Office 365 and some common utility apps:
11.1 gigs free is enough to make the computer useable. I would also suggest installing an SD card and moving the documents, photos, downloads, etc. over to it.
So with the above we have two different ways of approaching the issue. You can wipe and reload to the Build you want to have or use Windows 10 built in management tools to free up disk space. Its also going to take some file organization and moving of Library files to a separate storage partition on an SD card. Overall, the purple Cloudbook is not fast, but the word I keep coming back to is "useable". It can stream a youtube, it can create a business report on Excel and Word, and it can do email and internet, albeit a little slow.
Some may want to go to somewhat radical lengths to turn off Windows Update's automatic features to keep from losing several gigs of space overnight:
https://www.easeus.com/todo-backup-resource/how-to-stop-windows-10-from-automatically-update.html
We would like to encourage you to post a new topic in the community so our member will be able to help you as well, here is the link to post.
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Great article, thanks a lot .
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Very nice update to the original article!
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Nice workaround but means that every time there is an update there is a possibility that we have to overwrite the old installation again …
Did you have to delve into the old install to grab the Product key or did that get done automatically ??
On older Windows there were always methods of using external software to find the key .. but I believe that this is no longer possible … is the key now embedded in the firmware of the onboard drive and Windows automatically detects it ?? I' would hate to start the re-install process only to find I have shot myself in the foot because I erased the built in product key by removing the old installation partition
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Key is not needed. The credentials are embedded and also stored by Microsoft on their activation servers.
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And so, after leaving this brick to sit and gather dust, only using it for the wife (Computer illiterate) to browse the net until the battery died on me about a year ago.
I now find that there is a way to make some possibly useful upgrades.
1st
Hasleo WinToGo / WinToUSB allows (with some hair pulling) one to put a USB SATA CADDY with SSD or Mechanical Drive on the USB3.0 port or even the USB 2.0 port (slower)
A BIOS Upgrade to F16 and above should allow one to replace the 4GB SODIMM to 8GB and more. 8GB is on order, waiting for it to arrive.
There is a video showing that one could replace the M.2 A+E wifi card with an adapter to M.2 M key allowing PCIe x1 speed to load Win10.
Will look into that later when I source an adapter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=NEy6kjI6S1c
Its actually about another model but the ax000na or ax0xx is listed, in the description, as being upgradeable.
There are some Stream 14 models that not only have a soldered onboard drive but also there is no sodimm socket to swap out the RAM.
I had several problems getting Win10 installed and to boot, which boiled down to
1. Both Legacy Boot and Secure Boot need to be disabled. If both are not disabled then all sorts of weird things happen. eg, I could boot from the drive on my DESKTOP as a SATA drive but on the Stream 14 it would start to boot then switch to the internal drive.
2. if Battery is missing, old, or failing, trying to boot might seem to work only ending up with various errors.
One of which is Power Error, which I fixed by using a USB2.0 4 port, externally powered hub. Originally I needed it because the USB2.0 port seemed to have lost its 5V supply.
Once supplied externally that fixed the problem. Didn't want to start removing heatsinks and stuff to faultfind the normal supply source.
Some problems require fixing by "scanning" the drive, Click on Drive Properties, Tools, Check Now.
others end up with drive not accessible, fixed by using a dropdown box in the Hasleo WinToUSB app as mentioned here.
There are 3 buttons in the top Right Hand Corner, the one on the left is the drop down menu to find the route to convertion.
https://www.easyuefi.com/wintousb/faq/en-US/How-to-convert-Local-Disk-To-Windows-To-Go.html
For every error that occurs it requires a Google search to get a possible solution.
Right now My Stream 14 ax0xx boots from an external USB 160GB Sata caddy, and will hopefully soon get the Windows updates that it has been missing the last couple of years.
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I tend to use a fast class 10 microSD card for additional storage.
I have found 64-256GB SDCards from online vendors at good prices.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=fastest+sd+card+specifications
For a microSD card you will need an adapter.
Mainstream brands usually come with adapters.
A guide to speed classes for SD and microSD cards
https://www.kingston.com/en/blog/personal-storage/memory-card-speed-classes
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I am well aware of that and have been using 64GB micro sd cards in my mobile phones and Tablets for some time.
I am very wary though of usage where constant writing is involved. Most of these Memory cards are great for writing occasionally, as one would in their natural environment (Cameras) but if they get written to, too often, then they can fail. That includes USB Thumb drives as well. I prefer to use old Mechanical or SSD drives for bootable applications rather than cheap memory sticks.
The main point of my post was that the Stream 14 with RAM in a sodimm socket can be replaced with larger module, and an external / internal ssd drive can be installed by removing the wifi m.2 A+E card and replaced by a suitable adapter to m.2 m key
Thanks for your reply, I am sure that many users aren't aware that the sd slot can be used for temporary storage..
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Continuing my Adventure into improving this laptop
Memory is upgraded to 8GB , Currently all that I can afford. Was looking for 16GB but there don't seem to be too many and all outside of my current budget.
I now have an old but good mechanical 160GB Hitachi Drive installed externally via USB3.0 to SATA case for my boot drive
.
Updated Windows 10 with the exception of one 2023 update that it seems refuses to download and install.
A known problem from Google searches.
I have tested, using CrystalDisk Mark, my USB connection which is quite slow.
I have tested a 512GB mSATA SSD mounted in a SATA 3 enclosure, connected by USB3.0, which is way faster than converting the wifi adapter to take an ssd. This will be my next goal, to replace the 160GB with a 512GB on USB to SATA. I borrowed the 512GB from my Aspire laptop which I upgraded recently.
Results below
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4 x64 (C) 2007-2021 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World: https://crystalmark.info/
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes
[Read]
SEQ 1MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 454.143 MB/s [ 433.1 IOPS] < 18403.11 us>
SEQ 1MiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 386.445 MB/s [ 368.5 IOPS] < 2702.83 us>
RND 4KiB (Q= 32, T= 1): 44.886 MB/s [ 10958.5 IOPS] < 2823.63 us>
RND 4KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 17.555 MB/s [ 4285.9 IOPS] < 232.28 us>
[Write]
SEQ 1MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 436.437 MB/s [ 416.2 IOPS] < 19054.16 us>
SEQ 1MiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 396.440 MB/s [ 378.1 IOPS] < 2637.48 us>
RND 4KiB (Q= 32, T= 1): 36.425 MB/s [ 8892.8 IOPS] < 3576.94 us>
RND 4KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 25.565 MB/s [ 6241.5 IOPS] < 159.23 us>
Profile: Default
Test: 1 GiB (x5) [E: 84% (184/220GiB)]
Mode: [Admin]
Time: Measure 5 sec / Interval 5 sec
Date: 2024/01/24 14:25:17
OS: Windows 10 [10.0 Build 19041] (x64)
Comment: mSATA ssd on usb3.0 in mSATA case
I am posting these details since I am sure that there must be others like myself who have one of these doorstops and might be interested in making them useful.
8GB SODIMM cost ~15 Euros
512GB mSATA m.2 NGFF ssd cost about ~35 Euros
Case for mSATA to SATA cost about ~ 10 Euros