Notebook Software and How To Questions

Nearly five years ago in 2019, I bought my mother an HP Stream laptop running Windows 10 In S Mode with a billed eMMC storage space of 32GB as a Christmas/birthday gift. Though billed as having 32GB of disk space, the actual useable space is around 29GB.

Over the years on average, I noticed that, on the rare instances I've borrowed it, the disk space gradually decreased over the years, despite the computer not being used to an excessive degree (either by my mother or myself) to justify the decline in available storage space; starting with the 29GB baseline, over time the available disk space went from about 25GB, then down to about 16GB, then around 11GB, and so on downward.

When my own personal laptop got messed up last year (BTW, feel free to visit my other thread if anyone thinks they might be able to help out there), I was forced to have to borrow her laptop to try conducting a fix; by this point, however, nearly all the space on the C-drive partition for this laptop was nearly completely gone, and in the time since I've had to use it, the drive tends to fluctuate wildly above and below 1GB of remaining disk space.

The reason this has been an issue as of late is because in order to attempt repairs on my other laptop, I've had to try installing software to create rescue media to apply onto my other device, but the disk space has been too low to allow for the program(s) to create anything. Included below are a pair of screengrabs taken in recent days to illustrate this.

HP Cloud Recovery Tool; at least 27.01GB needed

The screengrab above is of the HP Cloud Recovery Tool, which would need 27.01GB of free space to complete its process to create bootable rescue media. The screengrab below is of the Windows Media Creation Tool, which would need 8GB of free space to complete its own process.

Windows Media Creation Tool; 8GB of free disk space needed

As an additional frustration, due to the stringent security measures of the Windows 10 In S Mode operating system on my mother's laptop, I haven't been able to make use of the Command Prompt, as the screengrab below will show:

Command Prompt application "unverified" in S-Mode Windows 10

Long story short, would anyone know of a simple and easy way to reclaim as much of this "lost" disk space as possible, or perhaps could explain exactly why this much disk space had been disappearing for no apparent reason? Once again, I am trying to use this particular computer to fix an operating system error on a separate laptop, but the extra-secure operating system combined with the drastically limited disk space on the C-drive partition have made things difficult.

In case this helps, here is a screengrab of the Storage Settings window to outline the most recent layout of the (C:) drive:

HP Stream Storage Settings 12/12/2023

Thanks in advance for whatever help anyone can provide.

ADonMartini_790