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Windows 10 Insiders sent on quest deep into Registry to fetch goblet of Reserved Storage

It's dangerous to go alone, take these WSL tweaks too

Microsoft dropped a fresh Windows 10 Insider Build last night, which brought some welcome tweaks to the Windows Subsystem for Linux and enabled Reserved Storage.

We had been promised that the exciting new feature in build 18312 would snaffle around 7GB of space but, as it transpired, we at Vulture Central have not been blessed by the Windows Update Gods, and only 2.83GB vanished from our system drive.

Other users reported similar fluctuations, with those lucky enough to manage to get the thing installed seeing the full amount grabbed on some machines, and less on others.

To get the new feature, we had to undertake a Windows Insider "quest", brave soldiers that we are. The quest in question was, er, to change a Registry key before the update came down. Sadly our only reward was seeing slightly under 3GB of storage vanish.

Without more detail from Microsoft, it is difficult to know how much space the new feature is going to snatch from your system drive (we have thus far been unable to persuade Windows 10 that it should shove temporary update files anywhere else), and with this being the last "pre-release" build of Windows 10, this could well be it.

Subsequent builds, which have yet to drop into the hands of Windows Insiders, are tagged as 19H1_release, according to buildfeed.net.

While Reserved Storage looks like being one of the more noticeable features of Spring's Windows 10, along with Sandbox and a whizzy new Light Mode, the new build brought tweaks to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, with more command line options for wsl.exe to export a named distribution to a tar file and import those files back in again. The import option brings things in as a new distro, which can reside on a non-system drive.

The release documentation promised that the exported distro would go to the default download location, but in our testing, the 1GB of Ubuntu goodness was dumped in a user folder instead. This, as Microsoft is at pains to point out, is still preview software, so we'll cut it some slack.

The gang at Redmond warned Linux fans that, going forward, only wsl.exe will get new management updates.

Microsoft has also tweaked the UI for resetting Windows 10 systems, but otherwise the OS remains very light on exciting new features.

Which, right now, is as it should be.

The best "new feature" would be for the thing to not explode on installation. It won't make for an exciting keynote, but will make for happier users. ®

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