1. Cost To Install Windows 10
2. How Much Free Space Needed For Windows 10
3. How Much Free Space To Install Windows 10
4. How Much Free Space Needed To Install Windows 10 2020
5. How Much Free Space Needed To Install Windows 10 Download

RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) for 32-bit or 2 GB for 64-bit. Hard disk space: 16 GB for 32-bit OS 20 GB for 64-bit OS. Graphics card: DirectX 9 or later with WDDM 1.0 driver. Display: 1024 x 600 or above. Windows 10 periodically checks for updates so you don’t have to. When an update is available—and sufficient free disk space is available on your device—it will be automatically installed. So that Windows 10 continues to stay updated, it’s important to ensure your device has sufficient free space.

Summary :

Have you ever encountered an error message saying that “Additional free space is needed on the drive where Windows is installed. Free up some space and try again” when you try to reset or refresh your PC? If so, you can follow the below guidance from MiniTool to solve the unable to refresh/wipe problem.

Not Enough Disk Space Errors When Try to Reset to Factory Settings

Case One from Microsoft Answers

“My computer is stuck in an automatic repair loop. When I try 'refresh your PC', it states 'additional free space is needed on the drive where Windows is installed. Free up some space and try again.' But, of course I can't because I can't get in there to free space!”

Cost To Install Windows 10

Case Two: HP Stream Not Enough Disk Space

How Much Free Space Needed For Windows 10

“In short, my son set up laptop we bought and then promptly forgot the email address to login. We can’t reset it via Gmail as they can't verify us so need to reset to factory settings and start again. I followed instructions to do this online but it came up saying not enough disk space to continue. Any ideas on how to overcome this? I eventually have a laptop we can’t use now and it is causing me a lot of stress”

Case Three from Reddit

“Hi my Acer is stuck in a repair loop. Just after a Windows update, I noticed there was no sound coming from the speakers - the driver had completely disappeared from device manager. I tried reinstalling legacy drivers to see if I could get the speakers to work... This resulted in my pc crashing and an error ‘Additional free space is needed on the drive where Windows is installed. Clear some space and try again’.”

Windows Automatic Repair not working! Read this post to find how to solve Windows couldn't load correctly and Automatic Repair couldn't repair your PC.

How to Fix “Additional Free Space Is Needed on the Drive Where Windows Is Installed”?

For this kind of automatic repair failure, it is due to the low disk space of C Drive. Therefore, to get rid of this issue, just as the error message mentioned, you should free up disk space. Yet, the process of freeing up drive space is slow and sometimes it doesn’t help much. Then, you need a much quicker way to just increase the size of C Partition.

In most cases, users need to refresh or reset their PCs when they cannot access the operating system (OS). Yet, when they try to reset/refresh the machine, their computers stuck on the Windows 10 automatic repair loop with some errors like “Additional free space is needed on the drive where Windows is installed”. Let’s see how to escape this loop and repair Windows 10 (here).

Part One – Create Bootable Device

Since you are unable to get into the OS, the first thing you should do is to try to reach your system environment before you can enlarge your drive C. To boot into the failed computer, you can rely on a bootable device created from another healthy machine. Following is the guide for how to create bootable media with MiniTool Partition Wizard Pro, a professional hard disk partition manager.

Before starting, prepare a USB flash drive (no less than 16GB) or CD/DVD and plug it into a healthy computer. The USB drive or CD/DVD will be overwritten during the process of creating a bootable device, so make sure there are no important files/folders on the device.

1. Purchase, install and launch Partition Wizard on the working PC.

2. In the main interface of the software, click Bootable Media in the upper right.

3. In the pop-up window, select WinPE-based media with MiniTool plug-in.

Or, you can choose Options in the lower-left to specify which drivers to be included in the bootable device.

4. Select USB Flash Disk to contain the bootable data for booting up your crashed computer. The data on the USB flash disk will be destroyed. Just click Yes to confirm the warning message to continue.

5. Then, it will start to create the bootable USB flash drive. Wait until it completes. Finally, click Finish to exit the task.

Eject the bootable USB disk from the working computer.

Part Two – Allow Free Space to C Drive

Insert the bootable USB stick into the target computer that needs to be reset. Power on the machine and enter into its BIOS system. Choose to boot from the bootable USB drive and boot the computer up. When the PC starts up, the built-in MiniTool Partition Wizard should open by itself. Otherwise, you can manually launch it. Then, you can begin to deal with the “Additional free space is needed on the drive where Windows is installed” error.

Step 1. In the main UI of the partition program, click on the system disk C to make it active. Then, select Extend Partition under Change Partition section in the left panel.

Step 2. Select a partition to take free space from for extending target disk C. You should choose a partition that has a large amount of unused disk space. Then, you can also specify how much storage space to allow from source partition to destination partition C simply by dragging the block towards left or right.

Step 3. Preview the change for target Partition C. Finally, click Apply on the bottom left to save the change.

Until now, you have successfully increased your system C drive. Next, just close the partition tool and shut down the computer. Then, try to reset or refresh your machine again, the process should carry out smoothly without the former error code of “Additional free space is needed on the drive where Windows is installed”.

How to Free Up Disk Space to Avoid “Not Enough Memory to Do Reset” Error

If you are in dire need to reset or refresh your computer, you should obey the above guidance to resolve low disk space problems quickly and try to reset your PC again. If you are not so anxious, you can try the following ways to free up C Drive space either for the coming computer reset or just in case of future low Disk Space Error while resetting.

Method 1. Delete Unnecessary Files

There are always many unimportant files or folders come into being on your system partition after the usage for some time, including documents, texts, notes, pictures/photos/images/graphics, videos/movies, audios/music, installation packages, applications, downloaded files, and so on. Then, to free up disk space, just delete those unwanted items.

Sometimes, the unwanted file you find (costing you some time) in a deep path is only of small size such as several KB, you may feel upset for deleting it doesn’t help much on freeing up disk space. If you are tired of searching for those trash files one by one, you can rely on the Space Analyzer feature of MiniTool Partition Wizard.

1. Click Space Analyzer on the upper menu, select Partition C and click Scan.

2. When the scan finishes, you can see a list of folders and files ranged by their sizes. Just range the items from large to small, and then the folders/files of large size will be listed in the front. Thus, you can easily pick out large unnecessary items and delete them.

3. Right-click on the item you’d like to delete and choose Delete (Permanently).

4. Usually, the user files will occupy much storage space on a computer. You can find out all the user cache files by filtering them out in the File View tab. Just input %userprofile%.cache in the File Search Filter column and click Apply. After filtering out all the cache files, just remove them out of your computer like in the above step.

Tip:

• You can also delete the temporary user files in the same way.
• In the File View tab, by default, the largest file is sys, it’s a system file that controls the hibernation of a computer. You can delete it to disable the computer’s hibernation mode while saving several GB of space.

Method 2. Move Files to Other Locations

Besides deleting unnecessary files, you can choose to move files that don’t have to be stored on Partition C to other places like other partitions on the same hard drive, other local disks or external storage devices like a USB flash drive.

Method 3. Uninstall Unused Programs

The applications on a computer are also a group that tends to take large disk space. For those programs that you not use or hardly use, just uninstall them once and for all. For those tools that you still use, you can first uninstall them from C disk, then reinstall them on other internal locations.

Related article: 5 Solutions to Fix “Steam Not Enough Disk Space”

Method 4. Disk Cleanup for C Drive

You can rely on Disk Cleanup App on Windows 10 to delete the unwanted files on C partition. Search “disk cleanup” in Taskbar and select Disk Cleanup in the search list. When the APP is on, select Drive C to clean. Then, choose the files on disk C to remove:

• Downloaded Program Files
• Temporary Internet Files
• Windows error reports and feedback diagnostics files
• Downloads
• Recycle Bin
• Temporary files
• Thumbnails

Furtherly, you can choose Clean up system files in the lower left corner to clean system files:

• Windows Update
• Windows Defender Antivirus
• Windows update log files
• Device driver packages
• Language resource files

Moreover, you are able to clean up Programs, Features, System Restore and Shadow Copies by switching to the second More Options tab.

Learn more methods to free up disk space from Best Fixes: Hard Drive Is Full Without Reason in Windows 10/8/7.

OK, that is all about the computer reset error “Additional free space is needed on the drive where Windows is installed”. If you still have questions related to this problem, feel free to contact us either by the comment part below or by emailing us at [email protected]. We will get back to you ASAP!

“Additional Free Space Is Needed on the Drive Where Windows Is Installed” FAQ

You can identify the storage of your computer by the following steps:

1. Open Windows Settings and select System.
2. Scroll down to click Storage in the left menu.
3. Then, you can view the storage condition of your C drive.

1. Search and open Task Scheduler in Taskbar.
2. Go to this path in the left panel: Task Scheduler LibraryMicrosoftWindowsServicingStartComponentCleanup.
3. Under Selected Item in the lower right part, click Run.

You can also launch StartComponentCleanup from the CMD with schtasks.exe /Run /TN 'MicrosoftWindowsServicingStartComponentCleanup' command order.

1. Power on the laptop.
2. Press the Esc key immediately the monitor is on and repeat the press option until you enter the Start Menu.
3. Then, press the F11 button to trigger System Recovery options.
4. Select Troubleshoot and then choose Reset this PC.

Refresh your PC will reinstall Windows while keeping personal files and settings. It also keeps the apps that preinstalled on your PC and the apps you installed during your usage.

Reset your PC is to reinstall the system but delete all your files and settings as well as most apps (except the preinstalled apps).

Restore your PC will restore your machine to one previous state and undo recent system changes you have made.

Summary :

How much space does Windows 10 take? Read this article, then you will have a general understanding of the Windows 10 space requirement. Besides, you can know how to extend space for Windows 10.

How Much Space Does Windows 10 Take?

Windows 10 is an upgraded version of Windows 8, which adds a lot of features and optimizes the deficiencies of previous systems. So how much space does Windows 10 take?

What Is Windows 10?

First, we need to understand some general knowledge of Windows 10. Windows 10, as a personal computer operating system, is part of the Windows NT family of operating systems and was released on July 2015.

One of the best features of Windows 10 is support for Universal Windows Platform apps, with significant improvements in system security, command line, multimedia and gaming. Windows 10 has made seven updates since its release on July 29, 2015, and this Windows 10 May 2019 update automatically retain 7GB of disk space to maintain system updates.

So how big is Windows 10? Actually, Windows 10 Version 1809 and Version 1903 take different space.

How Much Space Does Windows 10 Version 1809 Take?

How many GB does Windows 10 Version 1809 take up? Windows 10 from July 29, 2015 to version 1809 October 2, 2018 requires only 1 GB for 32-bit or 2 GB for 64-bit memory and 16 GB for 32-bit and 20 GB for 64-bit hard drive space. Windows 10 Version 1809 and the previous Windows 10 version mainly store the installation packages, folders, etc. that come with Windows 10, and only require Windows 10 to run normally.

How Much Space Does Windows 10 Version 1903 Take?

How much space does Windows 10 Version 1903 need to install? The 1903 version of Windows 10, which was updated in May this year, requires a minimum of 1GB for 32-bit or 2GB for 64-bit memory, 32GB for 64-bit or 32-bit hard drive space.

The dramatic increase in Windows 10 space requirement is related to changes to the Windows update process. So how much space does Windows 10 take on an SSD? Previously, only when there was enough space on the system disk, Windows could download the update, because the update requires downloading a large number of files to be installed locally.

Some users who are not willing to update the system disk will just leave a little free space, but Windows 10 Version 1903 will reserve 7 GB of disk space and use temporary files to fill the disk to reserve space updates when there is no need to update.

But users can only activate the new installation or purchase a new device with Windows 10 Version 1903 installed to obtain the Reserved Storage function. Once installed, they cannot be deleted. However, if you just upgrade to Windows 10 automatically through Windows Update, you will not be able to get reserved storage.

The principle of automatically retaining 7GB of disk space:

Microsoft said that this feature will operate with the storage awareness of Windows 10, which is used to determine how much space the system has left.

Then the system starts to fill with temporary files according to the amount of remaining space. When the user deletes other files, the system uses the temporary files for the placeholder.

Stop the placeholder when the temporary file occupancy reaches 7GB. If the automatic update is needed, the system will automatically release the temporary file. Then user downloads the latest update, etc.

Retaining 7GB of disk space on Windows 10 may not cause problems for most desktop users, but it is a hassle for users with limited storage space.

Six Solutions to Not Enough Space for Windows 10

How much hard drive space does Windows 10 take? From the above words, we can get clear information about it. But what if there is insufficient system space, what will you do? You need to take measures to solve the problem of insufficient space. Below I will introduce six ways to increase the space.

1. Extend System Partition

If you have some unallocated space on system disk or there are other partitions not being used completely, then you can extend your system partition to solve the problem that there is not enough space for Windows 10.

Talking to extend partition, I highly recommend using MiniTool Partition Wizard - a piece of professional and secure partitioning software. It can make it easy for you to extend the partition. Besides, it also allows you to convert NTFS to FAT32, format partition and convert MBR disk to GPT disk. So you can purchase it and have a try.

Now I will tell you how to extend system partition by MiniTool Partition Wizard. You need to create bootable media at first, then boot your computer with bootable media.

Step 1: After entering MiniTool Recovery Environment, select system partition, then click Extend Partition on the left action panel or right-click system partition and click Extend to continue.

Step 2: Please decide how much free space you want to take, and then click OK to continue.

Step 3: Now you can see the system partition has extended, then you need to click Apply to finish extending system partition.

Maybe you also want to know how to resize partition, please click here.

2. Delete Temporary Files and Windows.old Folder

When the system is updated, Windows will automatically save the data on the previous system to a folder called Windows.old. But if you do not need to use that folder, and there is not enough space for Windows 10, then you can remove this Windows.old folder to free up some space. In addition, Windows sometimes loads some temporary files automatically, and deleting these unnecessary files will make Windows run normally.

Now I will tell you how to delete temporary files.

Step 1: Please click Settings from the Start menu to continue.

Step 2: Please click System on the Settings page to continue.

Step 3: Please click Storage and click Free up space now in the right to continue.

Step 4: Please check all the temporary files you want to delete, then click Remove files.

You can get some free space for Windows 10 by deleting temporary files.

3. Turn Off Hibernation

When the computer is in sleep mode, Windows will use the Hiberfil.sys file to save the current state of the computer to the hard disk. This file size is approximately equal to the amount of RAM installed on your computer, so if you don't need to use hibernate mode then you can turn off hibernation.

Step 1: Please enter cmd in the search box, and right-click Command Prompt to choose Run as administrator to continue.

Step 2: Please type powercfg.exe /hibernate off in the Command Prompt window and press Enter to perform the command.

After you have turned off hibernation, you can have several gigabytes of free space.

But if you want to turn on hibernation, then you just need to type powercfg.exe /hibernate on in the Command Prompt window and press Enter to perform the command.

4. Uninstall Applications

If you have a lot of unnecessary software installed on your system partition, you can make room for your Windows 10 by uninstalling the software. So how do you uninstall the software on the system partition? Please read the steps below carefully.

Step 1: Please click Settings from the Start menu to continue.

Step 2: Please click System on the Settings page to continue.

Step 3: Please click Storage and select C: drive in the right to continue.

Step 4: Please click Apps & games to continue.

Step 5: Please choose an app you want to uninstall and click Uninstall to free some space.

Uninstall useless applications also can save a lot of free space for Windows 10.

5. Change the Virtual Memory Size in Windows 10

If you don't have enough physical memory on your computer to run the program and receive an error message with insufficient virtual memory, then you need to manually change the size of the virtual memory to make the program work.

Now I will tell you how to change the virtual memory size in Windows 10.

Step 1: Please open File Explorer and right-click This PC, then click Properties to continue.

Step 2: Please click Advanced system settings on the left menu.

Step 3: Please click Settings… on the Advanced page.

Step 4: Please click Change… on the Advanced page.

Step 5: Please uncheck Automatically manage paging file size for all drives at first, then please check Custom size and enter the initial size and maximum size. Then please click Set and OK to finish changing the Virtual Memory size of Windows 10.

After changing the size of Virtual Memory, you can get some free space for Windows 10.

6. Migrate OS to SDD/HD

If your system disk is full of files, then you can migrate your system partitions to a larger disk so that your system partitions can have enough space to use. But how to migrate the system safely and quickly? You can still use MiniTool Partition Wizard to migrate your system partition.

Here are the detailed instructions:

Step 1: Please launch MiniTool Partition Wizard and choose system disk, then please click Migrate OS to SSD/HD Wizard on the left action panel to continue.

Step 2: Please choose a method to migrate your system disk and then click Next to continue.

Step 3: Please select the destination disk and click Next to continue.

Step 4: Please choose copy options and resize system partition size, then please click Next to continue.

Step 5: Please read the message carefully, then click Finish to continue.

Step 6: Now you can see the system disk has been migrated to disk 2, but you need to click Apply on the tool bar and restart your computer to migrate system disk successfully.

After doing this, you can have a larger space for your Windows 10.

Conclusion

How much space does Windows 10 take? From this article, you can get a detailed information about it. Windows 10 Version 1903 requires more space than Windows 10 Version 1809, so if you want to upgrade to Windows 10 Version 1903, you can extend the system partition by using the methods mentioned above.

How Much Free Space To Install Windows 10

If you have any better advice or have any confusion of this article, please send an email to [email protected].

How Much Space Does Windows 10 Take FAQ

If you want to download Windows 10 ISO file on a USB flash drive, then you need a blank USB flash drive with at least 8 GB of space because all the data on the USB drive will be formatted.

Only the following Mac devices with at least 55 GB of free space can install Windows 10 using Boot camp:

How Much Free Space Needed To Install Windows 10 2020

• MacBook Pro, Mac mini, MacBook Air, (2012 and later)
• MacBook (2015 and later)
• Mac mini Server (Late 2012)
• Mac Pro (Late 2013)

How Much Free Space Needed To Install Windows 10 Download