New laptop has something like 60Gb used out of 128, but you can buy W10 PCs with only 32Gb of storage in total…?

Could be a recovery partition taking the extra space?

No I’m just looking at the main partition.

Some of those with only 32Gb storage will probably be 32bit machines. 32bit install of Windows should be smaller. However a full install of 64bit Win 10 should be around 20Gb. Many manufacturers then slap on loads of extras you probably don’t need. Plus it may have a pre-install version of Office either full or trial.

Apparently Win 10 can also decide to do selective compression on system files for low storage machines

Huh. Just ran the cleanup wizard, saved almost 40Gb out of the 80Gb used.

Most of that was ‘previous versions of Windows’ which I guess is restore points…?

why did you have previous versions on a new laptop?

No idea.

New laptop has something like 60Gb used out of 128,

Windows 10 installation is nothing like 60Gb, will be full of OEM crap.

Edit Must read thread properly before commenting.

Bought a brand new Acer at Xmas, same thing, had been upgraded from 8.1 to 10. Only issue is you’ll no longer be able to roll back to 8.1, so no loss there then.

It’s a MS surface, so no OEM crap.

Upgrades will be larger than fresh installs.
A clean basic install is about 20GB.
An oem install on a 32GB drive would be done from a streamlined image generally.
There are also a few tricks to reduce footprint, e.g. using compress.exe to compress the os files, which reduces space but also reduces performance.
128GB drive is tiny by todays standards lol.

Got a fresh install that is updated to Aniversary Edition this morning.

Windows is around 25GB
Windows Old is about 10GB
so even without an upgrade path from 8 there is a significant amount of old – if your device was built as 10 then updated to anniverary it will probably have the old. Also the offline retail content is about 400mb which can go.

If the surface doesn’t have an SD slot then learn to love the cloud 🙂 my biggest problem is my DL folder, keep finding install files etc. that I have used but never removed

Also remember windows has a habbit of installing a few things like games and apps that they are sure you will like….

Microsoft Explains OS Compression in Windows 10

I did do then anniversary update yes.

Re SD slot – can you install normal desktop apps on it as well as the store apps?

128GB drive is tiny by todays standards lol

Yes, with Surfaces you trade off storage and ram for surface awesomeness unless you really fork out.