[SOLVED] Inspiron 11 with 32G eMMC - can I move the OS to an external USB3 thumb drive?

[alank22]

I'm getting tired of battling the low disk space and inability to upgrade without going through a mess. Can I move the Windows 10 installation from the eMMC to an external USB3 thumb drive like a 64G/128G ? The performance of this notebook is already a dog, so I am hoping USB3 might be faster than the terrible eMMC it has built into the motherboard...

 

[hang-the-9]

Windows does not like booting off external media, but it's possible https://www.pcmag.com/article/352209/how-to-run-windows-10-from-a-usb-drive

It won't be faster but will give you more space. Or just connect a drive and use that for storage/program setup and keep Windows as it is.

 

[alank22]

I'm going to put win7 on it and see if it runs that better then.

 

[mdd1963]

I find it inconceivable that Dell ever thought a 32 GB eMMC drive would ever be sufficient for Windows, be it 7.8 or 10... (It would be just fine for Linux, however!)

 

[TJ Hooker]

I really doubt you're going to see a performance improvement from doing this. It may very likely perform worse.

 

[USAFRet]

I find it inconceivable that Dell ever thought a 32 GB eMMC drive would ever be sufficient for Windows, be it 7.8 or 10... (It would be just fine for Linux, however!)

I have an Asus Transformer with such a drive.
It is marginally OK for a web browser and movie system. Movies of course stored on the 256GB microSD card.
Nothing else.

 

[USAFRet]

I'm getting tired of battling the low disk space and inability to upgrade without going through a mess. Can I move the Windows 10 installation from the eMMC to an external USB3 thumb drive like a 64G/128G ? The performance of this notebook is already a dog, so I am hoping USB3 might be faster than the terrible eMMC it has built into the motherboard...

It is a dog for ALL of it, not just the drive.
CPU, RAM, etc, etc....

Win 7 won't be any better.

 

[alank22]

Actually, win7 seems a lot better. Half of the memory in use, 1/3rd of the threads, and 1/4 of the handles. I am surprised you guys don't think win7 is usually a lot faster on less than capable equipment.

I'm having only a few issues with drivers (because Dell doesn't have win7 drivers for this unit). I did find a wifi driver, so it at least has networking. Haven't been successful with video driver (it has radeon r5 (1002 98e4), but the standard vga adapter does support the 1366x768. There is some sort of AMD IOMEM PCI device, the USB3 controller, and a USB2.0-CRW device that still need drivers.

Instead of 7G free, I now have 15.5G free out of 29.1G.

 

[USAFRet]

It's 'better', because it is a brand new install. It's only been a couple of hours.
Now...run ALL the Win 7 updates, etc.

A brand new Win 10 wipe and install would also feel different/better.

 

[alank22]

I've applied all the win7 updates. When it was wn10, I hardly had anything installed on it though - and I uninstalled practically everything trying to get it to successfully install 1903 (which it never would).

Do you guys think a fresh win10 is as fast as a fresh win7? Do they normally use about the same amount of resources then?

 

[NightHawkRMX]

I have heard windows 10 is actually lower. Plus, its actually designed for devices like this.

However, it will be very slow either way. I have a similar laptop, and Lubuntu Linux was the way to go.

 

[TJ Hooker]

Actually, win7 seems a lot better. Half of the memory in use, 1/3rd of the threads, and 1/4 of the handles. I am surprised you guys don't think win7 is usually a lot faster on less than capable equipment.

None of those things necessarily mean Win7 is faster. Heck, Win10 might be using more RAM because it is more aggressively pre-loading stuff into memory, which could actually help it feel faster than Win7.

If Win7 really uses 8 GB less storage than Win10 with all updates and all the same apps installed, then yes that would be an advantage given you're so tight on space.

 

[USAFRet]

I've applied all the win7 updates. When it was wn10, I hardly had anything installed on it though - and I uninstalled practically everything trying to get it to successfully install 1903 (which it never would).

Do you guys think a fresh win10 is as fast as a fresh win7? Do they normally use about the same amount of resources then?

What CPU? What RAM?

My Transformer originally came with 8.1. Win 10 was no slower (or faster), simply because it is a slow system.

 

[alank22]

I think AMD E2-9000 and it has 4G memory.