Lessons I learned from a system with only 32GB storage

hsehestedt · Aug 19, 2022

I have a friend that has a super basic ASUS laptop, an ASUS VivoBook 12 E203MA. He wanted a system for nothing more than browsing the web, checking e-mail, and editing a few documents in Word. The system has only 32GB of storage and 4GB RAM, but at $139 it was a deal he couldn't pass up.

This system originally shipped with Win 10 and he was a couple of versions of Win 10 back. He asked me to upgrade the system and wanted to know if it could run Windows 11. Initially, I didn't realize that the system only had 32GB storage, but I went up to ASUS website and sure enough, they had all Win 11 drivers available. It was only when I started backing up his system that I realized he only had 32GB storage. This was confusing to me because I thought that the minimum requirement for 11 was 64GB of storage.

Even with so little storage, I noticed that with his Win 10 installation, he still had over 13GB space left. That's when I remembered that Windows had an option available to perform a "Compact OS" installation. I was able to verify that the factory installation of Windows 10 was indeed a compact OS installation. I started investigating how I might perform a compact OS installation of Windows 11. It turns out that this can be done by a single one-line entry in an unattended answer file. Many of you who know me also know that unattended installation is "my thing". So, all I had to do was modify a single entry in an answer file that I already had and start my installation. A few minutes later, I had a complete installation. Then I allowed Windows update to perform all of its updates, and it installed absolutely EVERYTHING from Windows update. I didn't have to manually install a single driver. It even automatically updated the BIOS (I know some of you do not like that).

When I was done, I had a system with over 13GB free space, almost identical to Win 10, and Win 11 seems to run faster than Win 10 did.

The bottom line for me was that I found myself amazed at how well Windows 11 runs on really low-end hardware and what an excellent job ASUS is doing of putting all their drivers up on Windows Update. This was a wonderful experience, especially since I was fully expecting failure.

So, don't be afraid to experiment with Windows 11 on very low-end hardware!

Bree · Aug 19, 2022

hsehestedt said:
This was confusing to me because I thought that the minimum requirement for 11 was 64GB of storage.

It is, and for Win10 too now - but this restriction only applies to OEMs when designing/supplying new machines.

A few years back MS raised the bar for OEMs and will only licence them to install Windows on their new designs if they have a minimum of 64GB storage. They are also required them to only install 64 bit W10 too. This only applies to new machines. For consumers with existing (now) below spec machines with smaller drive MS still support them, and their 32 bit W10 installs.

LeLibran · Aug 19, 2022

I believe feature/in place upgrades will probably fail with the limited drive space available, unless additional storage is attached, as there won't be enough headroom to 'download' the upgrade files and create/store the Windows.old backup. That's certainly what happened with the Windows 10 feature updates.

zbook · Aug 19, 2022

Windows 10 and Windows 11 per Microsoft have 20 GB and 65 GB storage requirements respectively.

Windows to go was an option to use a smaller storage size for a Windows 10 installation.

The Windows to go feature was deprecated.

Windows To Go feature overview (Windows 10) - Windows Deployment

Windows To Go is a feature in Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 10 Education that lets you create a workspace that can be booted from a USB-connected drive.

docs.microsoft.com

Windows To Go frequently asked questions (Windows 10) - Windows Deployment

Though Windows To Go is no longer being developed, these frequently asked questions (FAQ) can provide answers about the feature.

docs.microsoft.com

In this video they were able to use Rufus to install Windows 11 on a 32 GB SD card:

cereberus · Aug 19, 2022

LeLibran said:
I believe feature/in place upgrades will probably fail with the limited drive space available, unless additional storage is attached, as there won't be enough headroom to 'download' the upgrade files and create/store the Windows.old backup. That's certainly what happened with the Windows 10 feature updates.

I clone my 32GB 64bit laptop to a larger vhdx on a usb drive, then mount vhdx on hyper-v, do updates, then disk cleanup and then clone vhdx back to laptop.

I can do similar with my 32GB 32bit tablet but I have to jump through some hoops and loops as Hyper-V does not support 32bit UEFI. More hassle than it is worth tbh.

Incidentally, I have yet to try it but I might try updating 32 GB laptop to W11 by same approach i.e. clone W10 to vhdx, mount in Hyper-V on another pc, upgrade to W11, then reclone back to low end laptop.

This way I do not have to even do a clean install.

Ghot · Aug 19, 2022

Lessons I learned, reading this topic: Get more storage.

Bree · Aug 19, 2022

Ghot said:
Lessons I learned, reading this topic: Get more storage.

The problem being that these lower spec machines invariably have soldered in 32GB or 64GB eMMC drives.

cereberus · Aug 19, 2022

Ghot said:
Lessons I learned, reading this topic: Get more storage.

Of course, but most of these low end devices use emmc memory and storage cannot be upgraded but it is surprising (with a bit of thinking) the tricks you can do with a usb/sd card with a virtual hard drive vhdx file on them, so you make a removable drive look like a fixed hard drive, then relocate apps, data, pagefiles etc. Tricky part is mounting vhdx automatically at boot time. It can be temperamental even using Task Scheduler.

Ghot · Aug 19, 2022

Bree said:
The problem being that these lower spec machines invariably have soldered in 32GB or 64GB eMMC drives.

cereberus said:
Of course, but most of these low end devices use emmc memory and storage cannot be upgraded but it is surprising (with a bit of thinking) the tricks you can do with a usb/sd card with a virtual hard drive vhdx file on them, so you make a removable drive look like a fixed hard drive, then relocate apps, data, pagefiles etc. Tricky part is mounting vhdx automatically at boot time. It can be temperamental even using Task Scheduler.

I know guys. I was kidding.

hsehestedt · Aug 20, 2022

I was actually pretty impressed with how little storage space it took up. By installing Windows with Compact OS turned on, I still had over 13 GB free space on a 32 GB eMMC storage.

While I installed Windows with Compact OS enabled right from the start, you can enable it and disable it at will like this:

You can determine if the system is running a Compact OS by running this command: Compact /CompactOS:Query

You can enable Compact OS with this command from an elevated command prompt: Compact /CompactOS:Always

You can disable Compact OS with this command from an elevated command prompt: Compact /CompactOS:Never

On a 64-bit OS this supposedly saves about 2.6 GB of space.

cereberus · Aug 20, 2022

hsehestedt said:
I was actually pretty impressed with how little storage space it took up. By installing Windows with Compact OS turned on, I still had over 13 GB free space on a 32 GB eMMC storage.

While I installed Windows with Compact OS enabled right from the start, you can enable it and disable it at will like this:

You can determine if the system is running a Compact OS by running this command: Compact /CompactOS:Query

You can enable Compact OS with this command from an elevated command prompt: Compact /CompactOS:Always

You can disable Compact OS with this command from an elevated command prompt: Compact /CompactOS:Never

On a 64-bit OS this supposedly saves about 2.6 GB of space.

It certainly does save space. In fact, you should not need to turn it on - the installer is supposed to be clever enough work it out automatically.

However, I am not sure what the threshold is and I suspect for 64GB drives (needed for W11) it may not default to compact.

You do not need to have CompactOS enabled at installation time to later switch back or forth.

CompactOS was bought in to replace the older compact wimboot method used in Windows 8.1 to put OS on 16/32 GB tablets (the special 32bit Windows 8 with Bing OS).

The biggest issue with these early 32GB devices was they were installed as 32bit UEFI even though the cpu was 64bit, to save more space still. It was impossible to change these early devices to 64bit as the 32bit UEFI was baked into the firmware.

This was fine for W10 but of course W11 does not support 32bit.

Eventually, with advent of compactos and W10, 64bit installations became possible.

One can go one stage further and compress the whole hard drive but I have never tried that on my 32GB travel laptop.

Incidentally, on more modern 32GB devices, pretty sure you can install as 32bit in legacy bios mode for W10 to save more space.

I just did that and I have nearly 18 GB free.

Edit: just had a thought - is emmc drive actually 32 GiB or 32GB - I have a feeling without checking the emmc drives were 32,000,000 bytes which is strictly 32 GB. If so, the free space will be a bit less!

hsehestedt · Aug 20, 2022

cereberus said:
You do not need to have CompactOS enabled at installation time to later switch back or forth.

Interesting. I was not aware of that. I may try that just to prove that to myself.

Thanks for the info!

TairikuOkami · Aug 20, 2022

Ghot said:
Lessons I learned, reading this topic: Get more storage.

Get more money, easier said than done. Still I prefer cloud over a local disk, it provides multiple copies "for free". I have 500GB disk and I could use an extra space wasted on Windows partition, but it does not let me install it on anything smaller, so ~30GB wasted.

hsehestedt · Aug 20, 2022

I did some testing with interesting results...

Storage Space
=============

I configured a VM with only 32GB RAM. Windows setup ran with no problem at all. I found that a little odd since the minimum requirement is supposed to be 64GB. NOTE: When I installed on the 32GB laptop, I enabled the registry setting to bypass storage space checking. In this test, I used no bypass settings.

So, I tried again, this time creating a disk of only 25GB in size. This time I got an error message like this:

Oddly, when I click on "Next" Windows installation proceeds perfectly normally!

Compact OS
==========

On both 32GB and 25GB disks, the OS was not automatically installed with Compact turned on. So, that brings up yet another interesting observation: "When I checked the status, I got a message that says, "The system is not in the Compact state but may become compact as needed". That almost sounds like it is implying that it can turn Compact on dynamically.

So, for my next test I started filling up the HD and got to a point where I had 334MB free space, but Windows did not automatically enable Compact.

If I run the command compact /compactos:never it checks to see if there are any files that need to be uncompressed. Then it shows this message: "The system is not in the Compact state. It will remain in this state unless an administrator changes it". So, the message has now changed.

Finally, I turned on Compact and it saved me about 2.5GB of space.

Testing was performed with Win 11 22H2.

cereberus · Aug 20, 2022

hsehestedt said:
I did some testing with interesting results...

Storage Space
=============

I configured a VM with only 32GB RAM. Windows setup ran with no problem at all. I found that a little odd since the minimum requirement is supposed to be 64GB. NOTE: When I installed on the 32GB laptop, I enabled the registry setting to bypass storage space checking. In this test, I used no bypass settings.

So, I tried again, this time creating a disk of only 25GB in size. This time I got an error message like this:

View attachment 36896

Oddly, when I click on "Next" Windows installation proceeds perfectly normally!

Compact OS
==========

On both 32GB and 25GB disks, the OS was not automatically installed with Compact turned on. So, that brings up yet another interesting observation: "When I checked the status, I got a message that says, "The system is not in the Compact state but may become compact as needed". That almost sounds like it is implying that it can turn Compact on dynamically.

So, for my next test I started filling up the HD and got to a point where I had 334MB free space, but Windows did not automatically enable Compact.

If I run the command compact /compactos:never it checks to see if there are any files that need to be uncompressed. Then it shows this message: "The system is not in the Compact state. It will remain in this state unless an administrator changes it". So, the message has now changed.

Finally, I turned on Compact and it saved me about 2.5GB of space.

Testing was performed with Win 11 22H2.

I have seen a device turn on compacting dynamically in the past - however I think it only works one way i.e. it does not automatically turn off if more space becomes available. I played a lot with compactOS when windows 10 first came out.

This link explains the Compact OS pre-cursor wimboot.

WIMBoot Explained: How Windows Can Now Fit on a Tiny 16 GB Drive

Microsoft once claimed the original 64 GB Surface Pro would have only 23 GB of usable free space — that’s more than half used for system files! But Windows now fits on 16 GB drives.

www.howtogeek.com

Compact OS does essentially same except it uses the compressed files from WinSxS folders in C drive rather than a separate partition, but was more flexible. The old wimboot needed a special OS to work, and and was only ever supplied by oem vendors. MS never produced an iso although some enthusiasts created their own. Problem was it was virtually impossible to clean install - if you tried to clean install a standard iso, it took a lot more space and often did not have special drivers. Worse, the licence for 8.1+Bing was not compatible with standard 8.1, and you could end up unactivated, and semi-bricked as well.

From W10, the compression ability was built into standard Windows making it a lot easier to clean install. Also there was no licence difference anymore.

Wynona · Aug 20, 2022

hsehestedt said:
I have a friend that has a super basic ASUS laptop, an ASUS VivoBook 12 E203MA. He wanted a system for nothing more than browsing the web, checking e-mail, and editing a few documents in Word. The system has only 32GB of storage and 4GB RAM, but at $139 it was a deal he couldn't pass up.

This system originally shipped with Win 10 and he was a couple of versions of Win 10 back. He asked me to upgrade the system and wanted to know if it could run Windows 11. Initially, I didn't realize that the system only had 32GB storage, but I went up to ASUS website and sure enough, they had all Win 11 drivers available. It was only when I started backing up his system that I realized he only had 32GB storage. This was confusing to me because I thought that the minimum requirement for 11 was 64GB of storage.

Even with so little storage, I noticed that with his Win 10 installation, he still had over 13GB space left. That's when I remembered that Windows had an option available to perform a "Compact OS" installation. I was able to verify that the factory installation of Windows 10 was indeed a compact OS installation. I started investigating how I might perform a compact OS installation of Windows 11. It turns out that this can be done by a single one-line entry in an unattended answer file. Many of you who know me also know that unattended installation is "my thing". So, all I had to do was modify a single entry in an answer file that I already had and start my installation. A few minutes later, I had a complete installation. Then I allowed Windows update to perform all of its updates, and it installed absolutely EVERYTHING from Windows update. I didn't have to manually install a single driver. It even automatically updated the BIOS (I know some of you do not like that).

When I was done, I had a system with over 13GB free space, almost identical to Win 10, and Win 11 seems to run faster than Win 10 did.

The bottom line for me was that I found myself amazed at how well Windows 11 runs on really low-end hardware and what an excellent job ASUS is doing of putting all their drivers up on Windows Update. This was a wonderful experience, especially since I was fully expecting failure.

So, don't be afraid to experiment with Windows 11 on very low-end hardware!

It's all well and good that you had such an enjoyable experience with a 32GB system . . .

Back when they first came out, I didn't realize there was only a 32GB drive in a laptop I bought. Of course it was a couple updates behind, so using Rufus, I attempted to update the critter . . . Uh, nope! Not gonna update; not enough space! Etc., etc., etc.

I took the computer back and explained the situation. No problem, I walked out with another lappy just like the first one.

I did, finally, after jumping though numerous hoops, manage to update the silly thing, but I wasn't prepared to go through that with every update Microsoft came up with. Nope, you dummy; there's not enough space to update! So, I took that one back too, and chose another lappy with a 500GB drive! Update Heaven . . .

Looking back, since I had no problem returning two computers (that with proper knowledge could be updated) to Office Depot must have already experienced folks not being able to update because of lack of space/knowledge. A couple weeks later, those 32GB puppies were nowhere to be found on the shelves.

The bottom line here is that most folks, especially those who only have rudimentary technical knowledge of computers, won't have the know-how to do what you did, nor even what I finally managed to do.

I can only imagine that there was a lot of money lost on those silly things. And a lot of hair-pulling by those who normally knew what they were doing when it comes to updates!

hsehestedt · Aug 20, 2022

Wynona said:
It's all well and good that you had such an enjoyable experience with a 32GB system . . .

Back when they first came out, I didn't realize there was only a 32GB drive in a laptop I bought. Of course it was a couple updates behind, so using Rufus, I attempted to update the critter . . . Uh, nope! Not gonna update; not enough space! Etc., etc., etc.

I took the computer back and explained the situation. No problem, I walked out with another lappy just like the first one.

I did, finally, after jumping though numerous hoops, manage to update the silly thing, but I wasn't prepared to go through that with every update Microsoft came up with. Nope, you dummy; there's not enough space to update! So, I took that one back too, and chose another lappy with a 500GB drive! Update Heaven . . .

Looking back, since I had no problem returning two computers (that with proper knowledge could be updated) to Office Depot must have already experienced folks not being able to update because of lack of space/knowledge. A couple weeks later, those 32GB puppies were nowhere to be found on the shelves.

The bottom line here is that most folks, especially those who only have rudimentary technical knowledge of computers, won't have the know-how to do what you did, nor even what I finally managed to do.

I can only imagine that there was a lot of money lost on those silly things. And a lot of hair-pulling by those who normally knew what they were doing when it comes to updates!

Amen to that! I never really dealt with this before, but I was surprised at how well it all worked. But I still have not tried an upgrade, I just went right for a clean install, so I'm sure that eliminated a lot of hassles.

Wynona · Aug 21, 2022

hsehestedt said:
Amen to that! I never really dealt with this before, but I was surprised at how well it all worked. But I still have not tried an upgrade, I just went right for a clean install, so I'm sure that eliminated a lot of hassles.

Oh, my, yes it did! Since only about 20GB is necessary to clean install Windows, it goes swimmingly! Not so much when you're updating/upgrading because the whole package needs to be on the Hard Drive along with the existing OS. Add to that all the temporary files added . . . Whatamess!

andrewtjb · Aug 21, 2022

I didn't know compact OS was a option.

I have the ASUS e203 but mine is only 2gb of ram with 32gb emmc.

I bought it years ago as something I could carry on the bus to do some work instead of lugging around my xps 15.

From what I remember when there was a update windows would ask you plug in a usb stick for extra temporary storage.

Might have to dig it out at some point and see if windows 11 will install on it.

glasskuter · Aug 21, 2022

I've tried to follow this thread. I've only been involved in a couple of these low grade machines. In Windows 10, when an upgrade came down the pike and a machine did not have enough storage, the process would tell me. I could insert a usb drive, point to it and the upgrade would use it to create the windows.old folder. Then the machine would upgrade. Is that no longer possible in WIndows 11 without jumping through all these hoops? Just askin'.

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