Hi All,
I'm posting mostly because I'm trying to figure out what happened. If
anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them.
As I've posted here many times, I use a dinky low-specs netbook for
lecturing and other odds and ends. I bought the current model a month or
two before the Creators update so it was running Windows Anniversary. A
couple of weeks ago, I decided to update it to Windows 10 Creators
because I use Narrator often enough to want the features in the newer
version.
The short version of my problem is that I kept getting "low memory'
messages even though I was removing files and programs and running Disk
Cleanup.
The long version is that I needed 8 GB of free space to run the Windows
update. I had 6GB of free space to start with, so the Windows Assistant
told me I needed to remove files and run Disk Cleanup. I uninstalled as
much as I could. That brought me up to 7 GB of free space. Then I ran
Disk Cleanup. That freed up a little more. I also ran File Cleanup. When
I've done this with previous low-specs netbooks, a lot of memory has
gotten freed up 4 or 5 GB, but this time only a little was freed, 40 or
50 MB. The good news was that I was close, maybe at 7.6 GB free.
Once I hit that 7.6 GB free mark, however, I couldn't seem to free up
more space. I had uninstalled all games and most of the things that did
not come preinstalled. What was left were Jaws, Adobe Acrobat, Firefox,
and Office. After going through Programs and Features again for the last
couple of utilities (e.g., the Windows Upgrade Assistant) and after
running Disk Cleanup a few more times, I uninstalled Firefox, Adobe,
Jaws, and Office, restarting and running Disk Cleanup after each
uninstallation. Most of the time, I found out that I was at 7.8 GB free
though sometimes I'd be at 6.5 and occasionally at 8.5. Obviously,
whenever I was anywhere over 8 GB free, I'd try running the update from
the Windows Media Creation Tool (having given up on the Update
Assistant). I usually got the low memory error right away. A few times,
the update started and went through most of it's process; then it would
suddenly stop and tell me the memory was low.
Inexplicably, the upgrade ran successfully this morning. The last time I
tried was Monday evening. That was the day I uninstalled One Drive,
which remained after Office was gone. I restarted after that, and I ran
Disk Cleanup and File Cleanup. But memory was still low. This morning, I
didn't do anything else. I just turned the netbook on and tried, waiting
for the error message, which never came.
Now that I've run the update, run Disk Cleanup and File Cleanup, and
installed Office, Jaws, Firefox, and one more thing, the system reports
that I have 8.3 GB free.
Is the problem a bug in my system's reporting capability, or is the
problem something else? Any thoughts?
Ciao
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