You can see which ones are installed on your PC by going to Start > Settings > Apps > Optional features. Optional features. Many optional features available for Windows are pre-installed or acquired on demand by the system, or manually by you. If you use an external storage device, Windows won’t need as much free space on the system drive as it temporarily uses your external storage.Īcross each of these update paths, the total amount of free disk space required will vary, depending on the optional content installed and other updates that apply to your PC. Windows will prompt you to free up disk space or use external storage to temporarily extend the storage on your PC. This will result in a longer offline install time.įor PCs that don't have enough space to automatically install the update Windows will automatically optimize for reducing the amount of free disk space required to install the update. Learn more about our efforts to reduce offline time during updates (English only at this time).įor PCs with limited free space but still enough to complete the update automatically Windows automatically tries to complete more of the update process in the background while you use your PC. This significantly reduces the time your PC will be offline (or unusable) during the update, although it might temporarily use more disk space to complete the update. Windows follows three different feature update paths, depending on the amount of disk space currently available.

For more info, see How reserved storage works in Windows.

Note: For devices with reserved storage, an update will first use the reserved storage space before using other disk space.

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