If I update to W11 can I put in on another drive?

[Darujhistan]

TLDR, running low on space on oldish W10 SSD - 120GB, i've only got about 12GB of prgrams on there, so god knows what's happening, I'd rather stay on W10 but moving it is a massive faff and I have no external drives.

 

[Darujhistan]

Have you tried running disk clean up? see if this finds the cause of the lack of space or tried tree size free?

Yeah i've de-fragged, it doesn't save me any space, what is "tree size free"?

 

[Darujhistan]

Not defragging, disk clean-up. Run it, then choose Clean System Files and scroll through the list to see if anything on there is taking up a lot of space. You can usually safely delete any/all of them.

Tree Size Free is a program that shows you which files/folders are taking up the most space on your drives.

Yeah done that too.

 

[Darujhistan]

Managed to free up about 6.5 gig on an old Apple folder I didn't see without using tree-free, i'm at 8.8GB free now i'm - W10 is at about 58GB now, which seems high.

 

[Darujhistan]

Nice, you can stay on Windows 10 then if you wish.

If you do decide to go down the Windows 11 route I would use the current drive to update to Windows 11 and make sure its activated.

Once confirmed activated I would then do a clean install on a bigger drive and it should then activate via your Microsoft account or hardware ID once you have internet access.

Thanks, my boot drive SSD must be 10 years old now, so probably safer to move OS to something newer in the near future.

 

[Darujhistan]

If you prefer to stay on 10
Just buy a bigger ssd or get an m2 assuming
Motherboard supports one
Then clone your existing windows 10 drive to it

After time stuff builds up in certain places
Appdata and winsxs folders for example
And it's a bit dodgy
Deleting stuff in those
Which is probably why it's taking up more space

I've got the drives already, a 1TB NVME and 2TB SSD. So i'll clone it.