Hi all, I have setup dual boot as there are two (really it’s one by now) things that I occasionally use Windows for. One is reinstalling Windows for family and friends (Window’s installation assistant only runs on Windows) , and the other thing is Minecraft Bedrock Edition (to play Minecraft with my little brother, who plays on a tablet. Microsoft is intentionally limiting their Bedrock version to their OS only, which is stupid)

The dual boot works fine, I installed Fedora after Windows and there weren’t many errors. However, even with most of my apps uninstalled, Windows still took up about 200GB of space (what the hell??? That’s almost the size of what Fedora takes with all my editors, IDEs, browser, photos, documents, etc.!)

After running disk cleanup and removing nearly all non-necessary apps (so it’s just the default browser and not much else aside from Minecraft, which takes up 2GB), Windows still takes up over 100GB of space. I have also disabled hibernate as well as removed all residual files from some apps that didn’t fully uninstall themselves.

How do I cut down on the storage that Windows takes up? It’s kind of ridiculous. My only real purpose for the Windows partition is to play Minecraft with my little brother, so what else can I remove to reduce this bloated mess of an operating system?

note: I am not going to bother with VMs since I’ve already set up dual boot (and troubleshooted some annoying disk errors that Windows produced)

edit: I have removed all the “optional features” as well as removed the awdcleaner folder (which is a malwarebytes thing) as well as the esupport folder (which has copies of drivers I think). I have also removed a few more files here and there (appdara and programdata mostly) and now my windows partition is around 87GB. I have also deleted old restore points, which helps to reduce a few GB too. It seems that this is just about the minimum you can get Windows (apparently it typically takes up 60-90GB)