Windows 10 is still terrible in that regard. Like, laughably bad.

1. I dare you to try it on a computer with a 5400 RPM hard drive. A fresh installation will spend the majority of its time sitting around with 100% disk usage as telemetry, superfetch, defender and more all eat up the entire ~2M/s hard drive bandwidth for more than 30 minutes after boot. And then halfway through your day, it'll decide to start recompiling .NET, or some other package with zero user notification and your computer will come to a halt. But hey, you're resourceful right? Just disable those services! Nope, too bad. Every version of Windows (including creators updates) have made it harder and harder for a user to disable features that break. Services get moved to TRUSTEDINSTALLER, an account that you can't override. Those services get restarted without asking you. Some as few as a couple hours. And Windows Defender will restart itself, and the before-last creators update KNEW people were disabling it so they moved the link in Metro/settings to be more obscure.

2. I just spent Friday for a client trying to "fix" Windows for Microsoft and failed. He bought a "Windows 10" laptop with a 30 GB SSD drive. Too bad, Window alone, took 97% of the entire hard drive. I removed literally every application (including 1 GB avast) except for Chrome and Windows 10. Every time I removed space, removed the hibernation file, removed any and all disk cleanup stuff... Windows would then fill it with patches.

It also had a 2.6 GB "C:\recovery" folder. I checked online and they said "Feel free to delete it, it's from an old OS." I tried deleting it, no permissions--even as an admin. I went in, changed the owner from the glorious TRUSTEDINSTALLER and made myself the owner of all the files. I deleted some files, but one file refused to delete. The file? 2.6 GB. It said this file was open in "Windows Provisioning". I checked Windows 10 backups, restorepoints, file history, all that jazz. Zero.

I check online. Maybe I'm insane. What are the Windows 10 requirements for hard drive space? Oh yeah, 15 GB. So there are, "Lies, damned lies, and Windows hardware requirements."

Meanwhile, Windows 10 keeps spamming that "You need to free up space to continue downloading windows updates!!!"

Really? REALLY? Thanks for the update.

I download Process Explorer. They say find the open search and find the file handle of the file open. I do it. ZERO RESULTS.

I download a tool that lets you delete a file on reboot before a program will acquire the file lock. It queues it up. It runs. It fails. Still NOTHING in services.msc that has Provisioning in the name.

Okay, change gears. ALL they want, is to freakin' install Office 356 on their craptop. They've got an SD card with a 32 GB card.

By now, after clearing up at least 4 GB, C: is now down to 100MB free.

I download the 5 MB Office auto-installer. It fails with a pop UNDER error that you don't notice at first under the loading screen. Okay, instead of giving you a description, it gives you an obscure error code. Clicking it at least gives you the KB for "out of disk space." Lovely.

I load up the Microsoft website, I find an alternative downloads link. I find the offline installer.

But back to task at hand! I load up the same link on this slugger of a Windows laptop and I go "Fine, I'll download it to the SD."

But wait, sorry! Thanks to the ultra-progressive, consumer-friendly Microsoft, they're too forward-thinking to let you have a download link. No, you get a Javascript button. It goes right into the full drive and fails. Okay, control click? Nope, Javascript. Okay, load up chrome settings and change where the default save location is and point it to the SD card.

I download it for ~40 minutes. Why? Because it's 4.6 FREAKING GIG for the offline Office suite. What basically boils down to an e-mail client, and word processor, is larger than an entire Linux distro with apps. (<-Yeah yeah, there's more apps, but I'm pissed at this point so I'm taking comedic liberty here.)

So I wait, and it finally downloads to the SD card, and at 99%, it stops and goes "download failed." There must be some Chrome bug with temporary space or something.

Well! I'm not defeated yet--this is my job and I'm paid for results. I've got a USB flash drive and my Linux laptop (read: running an OS that actually works and can be configured and fixed by the end user).

I go to the same website as before with my Linux netbook. But wait, the page... it's... different?

Everything is the same except that wonderful offline installer link? They removed from the page. That's right. Go there with Windows, and then Linux, and go to
same Microsoft download links and they will intentionally hide the ISO links and only give you the auto-installer link to ensure you're only going to run it on a Windows system. So customer friendly! (They do the same thing with Windows 10 ISOs, try it out.)

At that point, the client's laptop owner had to drive back 3+ hours to his office location so he had to take his laptop back.

I spent at least half a work day.. trying to (fight Microsoft) to free some space... on a machine that 100% meets Windows system requirements.

Thanks Microsoft. I wonder why do all my game and app dev on a Linux box these days. It's almost like I like feeling like I own the machine I paid for. Could you imagine having to go through all of these anti-consumer, anti-solution when doing hardware upgrades? What if you couldn't release the case on your machine without getting a "poweruser" license key from HP first? After all, they're just trying to protect you and they know how to run their hardware better than you. The more you look at that analogy, it really becomes insane how much we let Microsoft get away with bricking our own machines. The answer to a working machine should never be, "throw it out and buy a new one" when simply changing a config setting (if you were allowed to modify those registry values--sorry!) would suffice.

"I see you're trying to turn your SSD onto ACPI mode. Have you purchased an Enterprise SSD license yet?"