77GB Used After Reset And Install

Hi Guys,

I was just resetting my Alienware M17.
A fresh install of Windows 11 takes up 77GB on my C Drive.
This is with the latest Dell Drivers, CCleaner and TreeSize.

I was not expecting it to be this big. Is this normal or not? In other words, should I just write off about 100GB for a Windows 11 install, or is there a way to drastically reduce this to about 10GB? I do not mind removing everything except the most basic functioning essentials.

ConfusedUser said:

Hi Guys,

I was just resetting my Alienware M17.
A fresh install of Windows 11 takes up 77GB on my C Drive.
This is with the latest Dell Drivers, CCleaner and TreeSize.

I was not expecting it to be this big. Is this normal or not? In other words, should I just write off about 100GB for a Windows 11 install, or is there a way to drastically reduce this to about 10GB? I do not mind removing everything except the most basic functioning essentials.

Click to expand...

Hi Confused user,

My C:\ drive takes 66 gb for my W11 installation, includes all the programs like office/Antivirus and others.

Ok. Thanks for the reference. The weird thing is that the more I delete like Office etc. the more it goes up in size. Now at 84GB after deleting OneDrive, Office, and so on. Probably just Dell recovery "SARemediation" is taking up about 18GB that I couldn't remove according to TreeSize. Apparently if I turn off Dell's recovery it will reduce the folder.

Depending on how many apps you use and how many personal files, 77gb is not out of line. I have tons of apps and my C: drive is 96 gb. None of my personal files are on my C; drive but located on a secondary drive.

The first thing I do on a new computer is to remove the factory recovery partition because I never use a reset.. The reason I do is taking a computer back to factory condition makes everything outdated and incomplete. Instead, I make regular backups which I can restore in 11 minutes and everything is current and complete.

If you do a fresh install of Windows, no way it should take that much. I know mine doesn't.

Windows displayed 25.5 GB.

Please expand the other rows with larger sizes as needed.

Please edit your profile with ALL your hardware specs. It will help us to help you


C:\windows is 25.5G - Normal
5 files should be hiberfil.sys, pagefile.sys, swapfile.sys and other system files - 17.7G is normal (my pagefile is almost that big)
Recovery - 5.6G is a little high.
System Volume Information - 5.5G is normal

Don't see nothing not normal, only the Recovery

We recently purchased a Dell. Our SSD, including installed apps but excluding most data, is about 55GB per WinDirStat. This is after removing most of the MSFT crapware and some relatively legitimate apps (e.g., Teams, OneNote, OneDrive) we don't intend to use. Interestingly, I didn't see much size difference after these "uninstalls", so I suspect they may not really be uninstalled at all, but rather, just hidden in the UI. Btw, we removed them through Settings > Apps, and not using the excellent Revo uninstaller.

One thing you may want to look at is the size of your WinSxS folder, which on our device is almost 10 GB. There's quite a few articles out there about this, including: WindowsCentral and HowToGeek.

More troubling to me is the whopping 300 MB of RAM being consumed 24 x 7 by mostly latent (?) and gratuitous (?) Dell apps, utilities and Services. Some (e.g., why is Digital Delivery constantly running when we've not purchased 3rd party software from Dell???) are no-brainers, but Dell's documentation is poor in this regard, and ProSupport - a joke in itself - hasn't been helpful, so for others, we're still in the process of researching. We intend to uninstall these ~ 1 / week, taking copious images / Restore Points throughout, just in case. If necessary, after uninstalling all but Dell Update, we may also write a script to stop some of the remaining RAM-consuming services loading each time the device starts.

With all of my installed programs, my C: drive is using 306 GB. My Windows folder itself uses 27.7 GB.

Is there a folder called Windows.old? This is there if you want to roll back to your previous version.. It has all your docs, pictures as well.
You can safely delete this if you don't need to roll back.