💾 The continual maintenance of Windows
Windows isn’t my choice when it comes to OS, it’s company decision. Fair enough, I can get around its shortcomings, except its hunger for hard drive space.
It’s a decent Dell laptop, but the hard drive is only 512GB. That’s minuscule. 1TB should be bare minimum. But, there we are.
After all the apps are installed, there was 250GB left. Not a lot to work with, but I’m not downloading files, creating content, editing videos, etc. The main tool is Visual Studio, SQL Management Studio, a web browser, and Jira. The database I use is 350MB, so you would think I could get by on that last 250GB.
Sadly not. Windows continually caches and stores temp files all over the place like an ill-behaved monkey. And it never cleans or goes back and recovers that space.
Now it’s a problem. I’m running out of hard drive space, so each week I have to check different folders to see if I can delete the .tmp, .dmp, .log, hot fixes, kb patches, drivers, and other files that waste my space.
In order to appear efficient and speedy, Windows caches as much as it can, all the time, for just about every part of the OS. Not to mention that idiotic pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys. The same way of doing things from a decade ago.
If Windows would take a dump in one place it wouldn’t be so bad. Or at least it would be efficient to clean things up. But no, it’s everywhere, and not always in the same place. Three cheers for random folder names.
I had 25GB free yesterday. Without installing, or downloading anything, I’m now down to 13GB. Windows has mysteriously used 10GB, and I have no idea where it is.
Sure, a 512GB drive was a mistake. But, for an established system, where I’m using what’s installed, you know, using the system and doing my job, storage shouldn’t be eaten up like this.
It’s now a game of checking folder sizes, using CCleaner, and trying to clean up what I can just to hobble along.
Yes Intel, this is an awesome feature of Windows. Everyone should have this Windows experience. Put that in your next ad.
As a comparison, the Mac Pro, I’ve used daily for the last 6 years has a 1TB SSD. It currently has 841GB available. It’s done 1000x more work than Windows, yet I use less space and don’t have to keep running cleaners.
