Windows 10’s Fall Creators Update

Windows 10’s Fall Creators Update (FCU)

Windows 10 Fall Creators Update Announcement

Windows 10’s FCU dropped earlier this week, to generally positive reviews.

The new OS version isn’t a radical change from the previous Creators Update, but it does introduce some new features and improvements to Edge, OneDrive, GPU monitoring, battery meters, and more. One potential niggle, however, is that the OS apparently has a bloated footprint, and leaves up to 30GB of data behind it when finished.

We recommend taking this with a grain of salt, since the OS footprint can vary depending on how new your OS installation is and whether you’ve previously updated it or installed fresh. This can leave the aforementioned 30GB of files on your system, in at least some cases, which would be particularly impressive in my case considering My Friend's current Windows folder is 30GB.

Google suggests this is roughly average, with a 20GB estimated footprint for Windows 10 64-bit and a range of 20GB to 35GB depending on the system. 30GB doesn’t seem unreasonable.

The conventional way for dealing with this problem is to either hit Start and type “ Disk Cleanup ” or to open File Explorer, right-click on the hard drive you wish to cleanup, and choose “ Properties ”

A variety of menu options will then be available, but the one you want, Disk Cleanup is shown in the default General tab. Click this tab, then the “ Clean up System Files ” option, and you’ll be able to select from the full range of system and non-system files (memory dumps, recycling bin, etc.)

Disk Cleanup Utility

Useless Computer (Site) helpfully details that there are now more options available than simply using the old Windows 7 disk cleanup menu.
You can also navigate to System, Storage, and then the “Change how we free up space” option. This offers the option to run a disk cleaner automatically when you’re low on storage space, and to set specific rules for deleting temporary files, recycling bin, downloads directory (be very careful with that option), and to delete previous editions of Windows.

Windows 10 Settings - Free up Space Window

One of the reasons that Microsoft Windows has historically been argued to be less user-friendly than mac OS is because Windows offered more granular options that were harder to sort through or more intimidating, compared with Apple’s emphasis on simplicity ( Although you can still get into the weeds in mac OS via the command line in Terminal ).