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64GB MS Surface Pro Only Has 23GB of Free Space
An anonymous reader writes "From the LA Times: 'Although Microsoft's 128 GB Surface Pro tablet is advertised as having 128 gigabytes of storage, the amount of space available to users is much less than that. That's also true for the 64 GB model. The Redmond, Wash., company confirmed Tuesday that the 128 GB Surface Pro has 83 GB of free storage, while the 64 GB version comes with 23 GB of open space. The reason for the difference: space already taken up by the tablet's Windows 8 Pro operating system and various preinstalled apps.' It's generally understood that your device won't have as much available storage as advertised, but it's usually a lot closer than this. Should device-makers be required to advertise how much storage is available to users, rather than the size of the storage media?"
Yes, they should.
A chunk of that space is a recovery partition. It can be moved to an external drive or flash drive, or deleted.
For the first time a summary that ends in a question can be answered by a yes.
On a typical linux distro like fedora I could have every app I'm ever likely to use _and_ their developer libraries in just under 10gb, always makes me wonder why windows is so much larger and provides so much less.
YES.
You can store a *lot* of plain text files (not HTML or source code) in 23GB.
And to think that yesterday I was complaining that our corporate Win7 image payload (which includes an automated "reimage" virtual disk) was fat and bloated at 13GB.
Well, it still is fat and bloated. But it's a slender reed compared to this 41GB monster.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
here is this beautiful car for you to buy, with 5 seats...but you can only use one of the seats because the plans to re-build the car take up the other four seats...
have to tell you the truth
or
lie
before you punch me in the face?
If they want to say it has "storage space" of amount X, that's how much should be available to the user.
If I were renting storage space in a building and said "this is 1200 sqft" and only made 500sqft available because I installed electrical and environmental equipment in there, I would be rightfully challenged by my customer(s).
The proper way to handle it would be to set asside space for the OS and then install the 64GB or 128GB storage device for the OS to serve up to the user just as it would be proper to set up electrical and environmental gear outside of the storage space of my storage facility.
Business in the US gets away with far too much "interpretation" when presenting information to its customers. This duality of storage space for RAM and HDD is equally outrageous. Sectors are still in base-2 oriented increments because RAM is in base-2 increments. Why break things just so that HDD makers can lie to the users?! In the end, when the lie becomes the norm, the effectiveness of the lie wears off rather quickly. (Gasoline prices are measured in dollars, and the 0.9 cents doesn't quite have so much meaning... we have all learned to just add one the the last digit in the price haven't we?)
Let's get back to the simple truths.
Yes, this will come when the figure out what the real size of a kilobyte is. My 16 GB I-thingie reports it has 13.3 GB of storage.
"Should device-makers be required to advertise how much storage is available to users, rather than the size of the storage media?"
No. They should advertise BOTH storage size and available storage space.
Place nail here >+
Should McDonald's tell you exactly what is in their burgers when we buy them or should we have the foresight to look up nutrition facts before buying?
Can't find the story, but has this not already been discussed here, at length?
I'm all for constructive criticism, but gratuitous MS, Apple, Android, *X bashing is just...boring.
Having said all that, >40GB taken up by 'system' files, WTF?
40 to 41 Gb of space needed for an operating system to run a tablet. Sorry microsoft, but here is where I jump off. I am not sure what fancy operating system you build here, but 40 Gb just is a bit to excesive. There must be a way to bring this back a lot! To answer the question: YES!
Can probably subtract another GB for the office install.
Years ago I bought a Palm Treo with the new flash file system, which was "advertised" as having 32MB of storage but only had 22MB accessible to the user.
Palm users went up in arms until they realized, oh wait, if the batteries die in my Palm, I don't have to do a 15-minute sync with my PC to get it all back.
The product managers seem to have forgotten what it is for someone to just go in and start using a product. To really find out how much a feature is worth. There are so many things they could have done...
1. Just deleted the recovery partition to begin with..
2. Provide a cheap recovery USB stick with the recovery OS and apps on it
3. Pre-load surface with a 32 GB micro SD car
Personally I feel surface Pro would have flopped in any case (a 4 hour battery charge for something specifically meant for mobile use is nonsensical), but things like this make it seem that the folks at Microsoft are not even trying to market to the customer.
I wonder if that number contains things like dedicated backup space and recovery partition. I couldn't imagine that 8RT would be larger than enterprise. There has to be more going on. Did they say if it comes with Office RT installed? With office, restore point and recovery partitions, I could see how you get to 40 gigs pretty quickly. If it is the case, then Redmond, for all their "the PC is dead" talk, still act like they are building a PC OS.
Take a 64GB SSD. Install Windows and Office and fully update. You likely won't have much more than 23GB free anyways.
Not that it matters since the Surface pro has a MicroSD slot as well as a USB port so you can expand to whatever you need.
You know, in my day, the OS came on medium separate from the computers HDD. They were called "Floppy Disks" and, for later and larger programs, "CDs" and even "DVDs".
There was no need to find your own degrade-ready writeable CD for 20p or USB HDD for £40 to make your own installation media, and the HDD installed on the machine didn't need to waste space with the disk image hiding on it.
Apparently, 10p for a CD/DVD that (being made from a proper pressing plant) didn't degrade in sunlight was a tad too expensive and you're meant to buy that yourself for extra...
We have seen this happen on other Windows platforms (aka Personal Computers) as well as other systems which need to store the OS and applications on the hard drive. Manufacturers don't list the free remaining space, just the total capacity of the hard drive.
There is however a difference with these new devices. The total storage is much smaller than computer systems with spinning disks. A long time ago, when total storage capacity on spinning disks was quite small in consumer PC's, the operating system was very small (DOS for example) and applications were similarly small (sent on 2 or three floppy disks). So, the impact on a 40 GB hard drive was minimal back then. Fast forward to today and we see a very bloated operating system (to maintain ridiculous backwards compatibility), bloated applications and the pre-installed crapware (sample "free" programs that are pre-installed and which you need to pay to use beyond a few weeks etc). all of this adds up and would have filled that 40 GB hard drive of the old days. when the pre-installed OS and applications etc. consume such a large percentage of the total available storage, they really should identify this on the specs for consumers. "The device contained within this packaging has a 64 GB total storage capacity however the available storage to you is actually 36% of the total leaving you with 23 GB to store documents and install other applications."
This would be a good thing to force the companies to do as it would probably give them incentive to optimize their operating system and applications and also get rid of crapware pre-installations.
it is more like:
here is this car for you to buy, with 5 seats...but you can only use two of the seats because the engine takes the other three...
It is amazing what software companies can escape with, things that in other engineering fields would totally blast them companies with lawsuits.
Can you imagine a civil engineer gradually patching structural inconsistencies in a bridge as they show up? Yikes!
PCs have forever been shipped with loads of extra crap you don't care about. I'm sure many of you would have had your own procedures for undoing this? Deleting intro videos, AOL trials, stupid 'value add' software no-one wants, pre-imaged recovery images that can be archived to DVD, demo audio files, office trials etc... This has always been the Microsoft way.
However, it's never been hard to delete them off the hard drive (although there should have been a first boot wizard that gives you a list of extra software and a checkbox as to whether you wish to allow it to stay in your install). As the surface pro should be full windows we should anticipate you only need to do your normal "add/remove features" to get rid of much of the crap. However it's still a dumb approach....
This is old news as anyone who foolishly bought a 48GB-60GB SSD because they didn't want to pony up for a 120GB+ one found out with Windows 7.
If number of features is related to size, then this Win8 install should provide about 20 times as much features as XP, 10 times as much as default Ubuntu or Debian install or 3-4 times as much as Win7.
I really doubt that's the case.
Nope. Put two gas stations next to each other with one selling gas at 3.999 and the other 4.000 and the first will sell more gas.
What they should do, the logical thing to do, is put in two damn drives. Storage is so fricking cheap these days, it makes no sense that they don't. One obviously holds the OS, with room to spare for updates and DLL bloat. The other is the actual user drive. Advertise 128gb, give 128 gb.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
> It is amazing what software companies can escape with, things that in
> other engineering fields would totally blast them companies with lawsuits.
http://apcmag.com/seagate_settles_class_action_cash_back_over_misleading_hard_drive_capacities.htm
> Can you imagine a civil engineer gradually patching structural
> inconsistencies in a bridge as they show up? Yikes!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/1829053.stm
You need to think about what is "customary" in the industry. For example, it is customary when advertising a computer to list the overall disk size in decimal sizing, despite the OS reporting a smaller number in binary, and not to subtract OS or pre-installed apps.
One could argue the tablet is not really a computer, but as noted even MP3 players have been fudging these numbers as they use some of the storage for their own use, so while this is a new scale, its still arguable customary to list total and not usable storage.
Which isn't to say this can't be fixed, Apple for years was at a disadvantage because they chose to advertise usable screen size, where the industry custom came to advertise tube size; so an Apple 13" monitor was as big as most 14" monitors (and some 15", it was really abused). It wasn't until a lawsuit challenged this practice that industry custom changed.
64 - 32 = 41GB.
Assuming half of that is a restore image, it's still 20GB.
How? It's an embededed OS! It only needs to support the hardware of exactly one platform, plus common USB devices. No backwards compatibility, no legacy support, and the only bundled application is an office suite without a decent email client. Twenty gigabytes for that?! I know Microsoft has a reputation for sloppy, bloated code, but... this is why. With the limited features of Windows RT, a better development team should be able to fit it all in a few hundred meg. A couple of gig at most.
I know everyone likes to go up in arms about anything and everything MS related, but some of the reactions regarding this have been rather extreme. Firstly, if you are so inclined, you can remove the recovery partition by creating your own bootable recovery media, and that can get you another 12-16GB. What everyone is also forgetting, is that you have an SD card slot unlike most other tablets (iPad/Nexus) and you can easily slot in an extra 64GB of storage space cheaply via an SD card.
While SD cards are slow and you're not going to want to install apps on it, they would still work just fine for all your media storage. You could store your entire Skydrive/Dropbox/Box on the SD card, use it for music and movies, etc, and that would leave you with the 23 (or ~38-39GB if you remove your recovery partition) for installing apps over and above whatever comes pre-installed. It really isn't that big of a deal. My HTPC has a 64GB SSD, and I still have around 15GB of free space after installing all the apps I'd use for normal productivity along with Win 7 Pro. The 64GB + SD card combo will work just fine for most average folks. If you really need the extra space, just pony up the money for the 128GB version.
I just don't get it sometimes. Apple doesn't give you an SD card slot, and everyone here rages about that. Everyone's beloved Google also decides to rid their Nexus devices of SD card slots and people grudgingly accept this. Then MS introduces an x86 tablet with an SD card slot, but everyone decides to rage about the OS actually taking up space on the device storage (shock and horror!) while completely ignoring the existence of an SD card slot and perhaps maybe, just maybe even commending MS for having an SD slot in their product.
I would give this a resounding yes and that should be applicable to all electronics - especially laptops. I have a Samsung Series 9, which I generally love, but the hard drive space is abysmal. It advertises a 128 GB hard drive but the C partition only has 89GB of space to its name with 20 GB going to the recovery partition. Its been a while since I purchased it, but I believe it only had ~40 GB of the 128GB hard drive free when I first opened the box due to the space needed for Windows 7 and said recovery partition. After installing the software I wanted and uploading my mp3s, my hard drive is down to 11GB free.
But your MS downloaded updates will take up space in your C:/Windows area and won't like being anywhere else.
If, after 20GB of updates downloaded (say three service packs), your OS now tells you to clean up and you've removed all your files, what, exactly are you supposed to do now?
I wish the OS and backup partitions on tablets and phones were on a completely different drive. I mean for the most part, the OS could actually be on a flash ROM.
I have a new Nexus 7 with 32GB of storage. 2.5GB were taken up by the OS. Everything else is available for anything I wish.
Yea just like how every computer and other device with storage I have purchased over the last 30+ years has done this....oh wait no it hasn't.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Windows 8 is a full blown desktop operating system. It is going to carve a large chunk of space out for its system files, swap, hibernate etc. and I would hope and expect anyone buying a tablet running it is going to have a clue about that. However it is pretty stupid of MS to contemplate releasing a 64GB version of the tablet when it just invites stories like this to be written.
Anybody remember Stacker of the good old Windows 3.x days?
It appears that the days of full disk compressors are back, and there is already a new Stacker-esque product out there.
I have been using MagicRAR Drive Press on my SSDs for a few years: www.magicrar.com/drive-press.html.
The tool does work as advertised, it saved me tens of gigabytes more space than the File Explorer/NTFS compression interface.
Drive Press won't work for the regular Surface because Drive Press is not an ARM application. I've already tried it and failed.
But on the Surface Pro you may use it to reclaim a lot of wasted disk space. Most of which File Explorer fails to compress for some reason.
Microsoft should OEM this tool. The Surface Pro could really benefit from it.
Or they should fix their File Explorer/NTFS compression bug!
Should hard drive manufacturers now be forced to publish the amount of available free space left after installing [list of popular OSes who paid for the advertising rights] on a new hard drive you wish to buy, just so you're aware of how much space you're going to have left to transfer your [illegal movie/music collection]?
Should GPU vendors be forced to publish expected performance metrics for [list of popular OSes who paid for the advertising rights] on the box of a new video card?
At some point designers are going to realize that the more we idiot-proof the world, the better chance of general intelligence becoming extinct. I can only imagine how far deductive reasoning skills will slip when everything is autonomous in our lives.
On a side note, I find it rather pathetic that a factory tablet image consumes more space in 2013 than damn near every single one of it's predecessor OSes combined. Talk about bloatware. No wonder we're debating the forced publication of residual memory with the stench of liability wafting through the air.
I was going to write something about how end users need to be aware of how much space things take and then the coffee kicked in.
How the fuck do you release a 41 GB mobile OS?
Simple: MS has any number of project teams, and they all need to write code to deliver features, but they don't account for disk space.
At some point, the hardware guys need to say, "okay, we can provide X GB of space for X dollars, more storage space is going to require more chassis space, thermal effects, $, etc."
Then that gets parceled out to the UX team, who get the vast bulk of the space, and to the installer team that parcels it out to software devs.
So making your software fit becomes a project deliverable, just like anything else. And then you can make trades, if UX complains, "hey, this loads slowly," you can say, "sure, that's because we compressed those files, if you'd like it to load faster, maybe we could 'buy' some space from Bob's team, or you can let us have some from the UX pool if you feel it's important enough."
Let's send some Surface Pros to the ReactOS group, and see if they can do better with the same hardware.
Microsoft is losing it big time. This was supposed to be a new generation of products that gets people excited about Microsoft in the tablet market, instead its just one stupid thing after another. I was waiting for Surface Pro as potentially a workstation replacement for my job, but considering its nothing more then a tablet with a butchered version of Windows desktop running in the background and slightly beefier CPU then most tablets (but far leaner then any desktop), it's very disappointing. And the price for this POS is ridiculous, Microsoft isn't Apple, they can't pull off prestige products that cost more then they are worth.
Microsoft did nothing to make this product actually usable by professionals, your buying a significantly crippled Ultrabook.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
MY SUB IS NOT 12 INCHES LONG!!
Storage is so fricking cheap these days
But less is still cheaper than more.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
For reference, my 64GB iPad 1 had something like 58GB free when new and empty.
iOS is a lighter weight OS meant for phones and tablets, I suspect MS has shoe-horned their full desktop OS into a tablet.
That's fairly heavy weight if it's taking up half the device, and makes one wonder how bloated their phones are unless that's an entirely different OS.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Ohhhwww... So... my grandmother only has to go out to the computer store _again_ to buy an external HD, lookup what a "recovery partition" is and what the procedure is to upload that to the external HD [she would call it the little box I guess]. Then find out which are the "chunks of space that is supposed to be a trial of Office" and how to get rid of this nonsens. Probably that is just as easy as pressing the "big blue E" for internet?
MS has a fair share of techies under it's customers, but the majority thinks that these kind operations are deemed to be too difficult for them. They might find it even 'dangerous', and wonder if they are not voiding warranty or something. MS should be more clear about this IMHO.
If this was shipping with a gnu/linux os and had "some extra's" I would expect the targeted customer group would be more than capable of getting rid of it all and install DSL so they could enjoy the rest of the 63,95GB... But n% of the MS users... meh, not so much...
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
Commodore did the same thing with the Commodore 64
64K RAM SYSTEM 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE
I bought a 16 GB Nook Tablet last year and it only had 1 GB for user storage.
They didn't mention the 32GB Surface for users on a budget. When you get that one, you actually owe them 9 GB.
I don't think you do ... I think you shove a desktop OS into a tablet, and graft touch onto it.
I suspect Microsoft didn't create a mobile OS, they just put it onto a mobile device.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Can you imagine a civil engineer gradually patching structural inconsistencies in a bridge as they show up? Yikes!
Yeah well, show me a bridge that can run Farmville...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
And how will the system update? When you need to flash a new version on to it, how will it download, unzip, and move the files into place if it takes 20 Gigs just to download it...?
Aren't we overlooking the obvious here?
What difference does it make how much space is usable on the drive, when the O/S itself is a completely unusable, unfriendly, and counter-intuitive piece of shit?
You sit and write a useful bit of code that has no bugs and get back to me. Plus, you've clearly never heard of regular maintenance of a bridge.
Ohhhwww... So... my grandmother only has to go out to the computer store _again_ to buy an external HD, lookup what a "recovery partition" is and what the procedure is to upload that to the external HD [she would call it the little box I guess]. Then find out which are the "chunks of space that is supposed to be a trial of Office" and how to get rid of this nonsens. Probably that is just as easy as pressing the "big blue E" for internet?
Seriously? Your grandmother is going to buy a Surface Pro? Second, if she does she'll be asking YOU for support (lucky you!). And third, I highly doubt she'll notice or care about the 23GB of storage left. Photos of the grand-kids only takes up so much space and all the electronic board and card games are online now anyway.
and here's why. If theyre forced to put free space it will shake the industry whene verything settles down we won't like what we see. The OS developers will just find ways to race to smaller OSs. What I would anticipate is that they'll shuffle everything into downloads. Yeah your Windows OS is really tiny but it doesn't have drivers for anything but the start menu, mouse and keyboard.. want application support. Download that, want printer support, download that, want window support, download that. It sounds silly now but we've seen worse things come to light.
Just another second banana
MY SUB IS NOT 12 INCHES LONG!!
That's what she said
Just another second banana
Its M$ of course you're getting screwed.
But at least its cheaper than a Mac.
Well, maybe not.
I don't remember anyone looking at HD sizes and subtracting the space occupied by Windows and other pre-installed applications and complaining that saying the HD in their new PC is listed as 80 Gigs but they only have 65 Gigs of "free" storage once you account for the OS, apps, etc.
Apple/Android tablet makers store their OS in a small, discrete storage device, with a second, larger storage space for user apps and content. Windows RT devices only have one storage space shared by OS, apps, and content. The smallest iPad is a 16 Gig device + OS storage space, the smallest Windows RT device is 32 Gig for OS, apps, and content.
Ken
Grandma's into bleeding edge hardware, is she? She sounds hot. Is she single?
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, I have two of them.
guess we are all getting older ...
"Should device-makers be required to advertise how much storage is available to users, rather than the size of the storage media?"
This should have been the case from the very beginning. At least most of the android manufactures "get it" and leave the microSD slot available for users to upgrade themselves.
Well, with such a low UID I think she might qualify IYO :-P
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
The OS takes about ~41GB.
This means that with all worthwhile apps installed, 41GB of storage would suffice.
If anything, they're overselling with 64GB.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
You sit and write a useful bit of code that has no bugs and get back to me.
most of software bugs out there are implementation mistakes that can be detected by
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification
i believe what parent was referring to was that civil engineers validate their designs using a model of the bridge in a simulated environment, do software engineers validate a model of the software in a simulated environment?? nope, only those working in very critical applications.
I realize it's Buyer beware, but when companies that sell PC's, Phones, tablets, or any data storage device advertise 128GB, they are not clearly stating total storage space minus operating system and bloat-ware. They are touting 128GB or 64GB, honestly when they would only use a smidgen of that space it really wasn't an issue, but now.... it's become misleading advertising.
It needs to stop.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Well when you buy a computer that has a 500 GB HDD in it how much space do you really get for yourself, after windows, software, apps and overhead you might get 450 GB actual free space
I don't see how the Windows 8 OS with all of it's preinstalled apps can be so bloated. I understand it's a full blown OS and isn't slimmed down like Android or iOS for example, but that is still a lot of space for just the OS to be taking up.
I used to get pissed that my C64 said it had 38911 bytes free. Damn OS bloat.
Be seeing you...
I don't think comparing SW to a bridge is a very fair comparison. Can you imagine what it would cost you to buy software (or a computer or a gizmo or anything for that matter) if it was required to be engineered the way a bridge is? I also get annoyed at what seem (on the surface) to be stupid bugs that SW vendors seem to patch every other day, but I don't think it's realistic to expect SW to have zero bugs and require zero patching after it has been released.
Considering that the Pro isn't running Windows RT, that's spot on.
Can you imagine a civil engineer gradually patching structural inconsistencies in a bridge as they show up? Yikes!
Yes, because I've seen bridge maintenance. I've also driven over (patched and non) potholes, aka. "structural inconsistencies on flat roadway."
And just like in the software development, when the patching gets too abundant for the traffic on the road, they'll rip up the whole thing and rebuild it.
So no, software does not get away with more than other fields of design. All fields are judged by urgency of problems. A bridge collapsing under the weight of a car is urgent, a bridge wiggling oddly enough to damage the pavement every 3 weeks is not so urgent. A program that crashes but has autosaves so you never lose more than 4 minutes worth of work is not urgent, but the embedded system on modern medical devices is. Same standard.
Can you imagine a civil engineer gradually patching structural inconsistencies in a bridge as they show up? Yikes!
Yeah, it's almost as if software and bridges are two entirely different things and require totally different approaches to maintain them!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Tools_for_DoubleSpace
Lol. My kingdom for a mod point...
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. ~ Douglas Adams
i agree with you. the problem though is that some software vendors (microsoft is very guilty) have been cooking a culture of buggy/insecure software for a long time. at this point everyone is so conformed about using buggy software that they even find it funny! heck I find equal/better quality software developed by the opensource community and i dont even have to pay for it! shouldnt this push the vendors to release better quality software to differentiate themselves? it seems not!
it is certainly unrealistic to expect bug free software (not even formal validation guarantees that) but the way things are done today is just crazy! i mean, really? do i really need to have my computer reboot several times before i even login, to patch holes that should have been fixed before production?
Windows is/was as low as third?
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/windows-drops-to-no-3-cash-cow-status-in-microsoft-latest-quarter/11696
"Windows and Office: They've been Microsoft's two biggest cash cows since... forever.
But in Microsoft's second fiscal 2012 quarter ending December 31, 2011, Windows/Windows Live dropped to No. 3, behind the Microsoft Business Division (home of Office) and Server and Tools. "
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I have a HP DV9000 from 2007 that has two HDDs in it, well one SSD for the OS and the Second larger HDD for Storage, it is the best way to do it really. Two > One, and more > less.
you could start by deleting the leftover installation source files
You seem to have missed the point that the software *is* the model. Do you want them to write another piece of software that is a model of that model to test in a simulated environment (which is yet another model)?
I would love to know what kind of battery life they're getting ... a full-on desktop OS on a tablet likely isn't going to translate into much.
Sounds odd for a tablet.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
That's a terrible analogy. An OS is infinitely more complex than a bridge structure. Also, hackers aren't devising ways of hacking a bridge on a daily basis.
The 128 GB Surface Pro has 83 GB of free storage, while the 64 GB version comes with 23 GB of open space
You think that's bad? I bought the 32 GB version!
You're stuck in a desktop mentality.
My handheld devices have had a separate space for os vs user apps and data for decades now.
Windows/Windows Live dropped to No. 3, behind the Microsoft Business Division (home of Office) and Server and Tools. "
Yes, and I bet most of their customers for "Microsoft Business Division (home of Office) and Server and Tools" runs Linux of MacOS.
Wake up. If windows goes down the drain, so will the rest of their revenue stream, including "Microsoft Business Division (home of Office) and Server and Tools". Windows is responsible for 90% of their revenue, directly for 30% and indirectly for 60%.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Now this!
In the lower capacity drives, it wasn't so painfully obvious that we all lost so much space to the flawed 1000 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte conversion rate as sold. Now, as such capacity losses are becoming a whole lot more obvious, space being eaten up by the OS and (in many cases) needed, pre-installed apps is growing ever more disconcerting.
As a collective community, we really need to stand up and tell the assorted gadget makers that we're simply not going to take it any more!
What kind of space losses are people going to accept when the Petabyte drives finally make it to market? How bloated are the next generation of OS and productivity programs going to be? What is considered "Acceptable Use" in OS and bloatware storage reduction?
Where is the proverbial Line in the Sand?
It's size is advertised as 500gb, but it's more like 490gb because of file system overhead. They also don't count for the OS install, should they start? Consumer ignorance is bliss I suppose. The rationality behind having to update box/product specs every time your OS has an update is bordering on stupidity. Sorry, I realize this is a MS bash theme we have going here... so I'll contribute to the mob mentality.. Grrr, those darn MS guys, anything they do is stupid and wrong! (typed on my Windows 8 desktop)
Yes it should be required.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The correct answer is 'both'.
Fucking Americans.
IOW, MS fucks up the tablets by handling them as desktops again.
wait, I though MS was fucking up the desktops by handling them like tablets now.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Grandma's wondering why her grandson was so cheap he only got her a 32 Gig Surface with only 16 Gigs of space (on the RT model)...
Oh wait, did you get grandma the yet-unreleased Surface Pro? What exactly is Grandma's use case that supports the i5-based Surface Pro YET leave her incapable of attaching a USB drive to her tablet?
Ken
Ohhhwww... So... my grandmother only has to go out to the computer store _again_ to buy an external HD, lookup what a "recovery partition" is and what the procedure is to upload that to the external HD [she would call it the little box I guess]. Then find out which are the "chunks of space that is supposed to be a trial of Office" and how to get rid of this nonsens. Probably that is just as easy as pressing the "big blue E" for internet?
Seriously? Your grandmother is going to buy a Surface Pro? Second, if she does she'll be asking YOU for support (lucky you!). And third, I highly doubt she'll notice or care about the 23GB of storage left. Photos of the grand-kids only takes up so much space and all the electronic board and card games are online now anyway.
All those Matlock episodes in HD that they download from p2p take a lot of place.
lucm, indeed.
I wonder how much space could be saved if parts of the OS were compressed with UPX? Or even with NTFS compression? Or is it using one of those SSDs that requires compressible data?
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
Congratulations, you have struck upon the ENTIRE POINT OF THE CONVERSATION. May you forever now look proudly in the mirror and tell yourself "I'm the guy who 'got it'."
Yes, every computer and storage-related device has been doing that for many, many, many years.
THAT'S EXACTLY THE PROBLEM. That would be precisely the point of the story, the point of the final question in the summary, and generally, the point of even being in this thread.
I'm not sure if you should receive a *WHOOSH*, or just a facepalm. I'm leaning towards the latter.
If a cloud drive is not expansion then why does MS tout it as a solution for a congested hard drive. On my mobile devices I don't want to attach unportable storage or things that stick out of ports. I want it built in at a sufficient level for most things. For slower stuff I can use the cloud for more.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
woah... the thing only has 4 hours of battery life? I thought 6 is the standard these days on ultraportables and 8 for "tablets". Screw that I'm going back to a regular laptop.
Everyone, please stop saying microsoft.....the only way to get a bully to go away is if everyone turns their back on them and never talks of them, about them or deals with them. Eventually they will starve as no one does any further transactions with them.
So shhhhhh, go 1 year without every saying microsoft, windows or mentioning ANY of their products, when someone asks you about them, change the subject, refuse to even acknowledge the thing/product even is spoken of.
Hang on, how are people viewing this? As a cut down device like iOS and Android or as M$ wants it as, a portable PC (Pro not the useless RT)? Let's not forget, SD Card slot (XC too, that's what, up to 1TB future capacity?), so this thing is going to cost est. £15/$27 to add another 32GB? Ignoring the lovely droid for now, what's the cost for an iOS user to upgrade from a 16GB slab? £400/$600 for a new device? Don't really mind if there's bloat on there eating up internal storage, prefer that to a walled garden any day...
To be fair, this is hardly a Microsoft-specific problem. I recently bought a Samsung Ultrabook with a 64GB SSD, and the recovery partition alone took up over 20GB! It's as if manufacturers don't envision any actual usage of a device beyond a quick demo at a trad show.
How often is it needed thou?
A bridge that fails is very fucking back.
Most of the time when software fails. Not so bad.
It is all about scale and return on investment.
They do that all the time. It is called maintainance. For example, they just replaced three rusted beams on a local bridge in less than a day. The original contractor used the regular paint on them, not the salt resistant one, despite the fact they were lower than the roadway.
https://www.google.ca/search?q=lawsuit+over+disk+usage+on+surface+tablets
MS is being taken to court over this already.
...when I learned that my beloved Commodore 64 had only 38kb of usable RAM.
For the un-initiated, the issue was this: the OS (BASIC + kernel + font definitions) were stored in ROM, but on boot, were immediately copied to specific banks of RAM. If you were not going to use text, or if you were not going to use BASIC (or call any BASIC routines from an assembled/compiled program) you could use the RAM for other purposes, but you had to employ some tricks to do so.
Additionally, there were some registers that were dedicated for specific tasks. Things like screen memory and raster interrupts and other various things. They might technically be RAM, but if you tried to put code into them, you might throw your computer into an unacceptable state.
Ah, the good old days... I'm glad Microsoft has brought that all back.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Microsoft sold me a zero-maintenance tablet, and then broke it, and you want me to fix it myself? This is why people still buy from Apple.
Changa hates change.
Every time I use two drives or partitions the split is wrong. Sooner or later one will be full while the other has still place and you start with dirty hacks like data on the first drive or programs on the second. You definitely don't want that for consumer devices.
128 GB SOLID STATE DRIVE
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eighty three gigabytes available
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I remember reading that on the Surface you could only use the memory card for media, not applications. Is that still true on the Surface Pro?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can assure you that the kernel is not 41GB in Windows 8.
Can you imagine a civil engineer gradually patching structural inconsistencies in a bridge as they show up? Yikes!
A bridge costs millions of dollars.
32GB SSD costs ~£30.
So you want to make an already overpriced toy cost £30 more?
Great plan dude.
32gb memory is very cheap right now... well the memory is. Seeing Windows want to create a 50gb swap file is priceless...
Even more amazing, it needs it to. On Linux I haven't used swap in ages. Memory is CHEAP MS. Learn to do without a page file or at least not an insane amount. 1.5 times memory stops making any sense above 4 gig.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Can you imagine a civil engineer gradually patching structural inconsistencies in a bridge as they show up? Yikes!
Yes. It's called the shop drawing process plus ongoing controlled inspections in the field. It is always said that there are three sets of drawings on a project: the design drawings, the shop drawings, and the as-builts. None of them are the same. Things often change during construction for a variety of reasons, but they are always reviewed and approved by the engineer.
Yeah, all hardware in virtual machines are emulated, which is how one can have any number of registers in a virtual machine (assuming of course that the real machine has adequate resources in terms of CPU, RAM, hard disk & so on)
And Windows costs billions of dollars. Just that the copies are practically free...
> The reason for the difference: space already taken up by the tablet's Windows 8 Pro operating system and various preinstalled apps.
The OS has become a rodent -- excuse me, os, of unusual size some time ago, so no surprise there. I think the issue is whether and to what extent the preinstalled apps are useful. If this includes, for instance, a usable copy (not just a demo) of Office, then I'd give up some disk space for that. But if it's the usual crufty collection of bloatware and demos of stuff we'd never use, then bleh.
I'd like to see one of the review organizations get hold of one and strip it down to the bare OS, and tell us how much space is left. That would be very useful information.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
A bridge is a much, much smaller design project than an OS and there are far, far better tools to assist in the design of a bridge. A more apt comparison would be developing the entire transportation system for the continental US with little more than an office suite to assist.
Remember something that ? 64K RAM SYSTEM 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE
Same place you would insert the external drive or flash drive.
Then you'd have to include "the external drive or flash drive" in the total cost of ownership of the device.
it is more like:
here is this car for you to buy, with 5 seats...but you can only use two of the seats because the engine takes the other three...
It is amazing what software companies can escape with, things that in other engineering fields would totally blast them companies with lawsuits. Can you imagine a civil engineer gradually patching structural inconsistencies in a bridge as they show up? Yikes!
Software can, in fact, be made as reliable as bridges. But you better be prepared to pay a lot more for your software...
The fact is, the market prefers cheap and buggy over expensive and reliable. If that upsets you, preach your message to the users, not the developers. The developers are only giving users what they want.
Grandma doesn't care about the Cloud, or straming media, or apps. All she wants is for her son to fix the damn thing so she can write FORTRAN.
XP mode is gone from Windows 8. You no longer get Virtual PC, which is where XP Mode is: instead, you get Hyper-V, which may or may not have it. The least Microsoft should have done was to keep Virtual PC for Windows 8, in which they could have had an XP mode, a 7 mode and even an 8 mode (you might want to run multiple instances of the same OS as the host, just to have isolated memory sessions and so on)
Think about it...
Every PC advertising since the 1980s touted X-amount of megabytes and eventually gigabytes, etc. However, with OS requiring more space, there would less space for the user to use, but the PC manufacturers still touted the full size of the HDD....
You can make a class action lawsuit not only against MS but against ALL OTHER PC makers since the beginning!!!! This is a lawyer's dream!
No, they should advertise ONLY available storage space. When people can easily install/reinstall the OS on that hardware, that's when they can start advertising the storage size.
Debian on this laptop is using 5.2GB on / (with multiple DE's and WM's installed) including several old kernels I've been too lazy to bother removing. I thought I was wasting space by using 10GB for my root partition, too. smh
Or put the OS in a separate on-board flash memory device (similar to the BIOS - just expand it to include the space for the OS kernel) and all the applications and data on the main hard drive or solid state drive.
How much space is available on a 64 Gig MacBook Air?
Looking at my OSX system installation, the whole thing with iLife & iWork is around 12GB.
You could probably add 10GB more for swap or sleep images, still leaving the user around 44GB...
Shipping a full desktop OS with that little storage space is a bad idea though, you know most people will be installing Photoshop on it and that's a good chunk right there.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Macbook airs are worthless as dev machines.
The old ones, sort of - but not the newer models. I know a number of people that use Macbook Air's for full time iOS development. They do often use a second monitor but the actual hardware is speedy enough to run the development tools well now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
As I recall, this particular race-to-the-bottom began in the contest between truth and adspeak when engineers failed to convince math deficient, ethically challenged marketing people to accept that the difference between 1024 and 1000 was truthfully significant. Thus, in the translation between these business groups, a megabyte became equal 1 million bytes rather than 1,048,576 bytes. The hard drives sold using the new marketing math were more attractive to consumers ergo sales increased, and it followed on that soft truth became superior to actual truth in estimation of management, where truth usually seems subject to some transmography.
The deceit was successfully defended using business ethics (in the gray area where dollars regularly bend truth to their will). Considering that 1000/1024 = 0.97656, truth was subject to the small error rate of 2.344%. Microsoft isn't engaged in anything new here. I recall no tech specs for new computers ever including OS storage requirements. However now that the fudge factor has eaten up 35% of the logical definition of "storage space," perhaps it's time someone told Steve Balmer that his clothes are falling off and his particular naked emporer routine is getting a little ugly.
Then again, we should all remember that in the case of legitimate rape, the wallet has a way of shutting down.
Or does it...
Software can, in fact, be made as reliable as bridges. But you better be prepared to pay a lot more for your software...
That is the thing.. I don't pay for most software I'm using, it is available to me as opensource. Because I don't pay for it, I cannot demand higher quality standards. Regarding the software I actually pay (well, somewhat, my lab. does), it certainly has higher quality standards (I think it is more expensive too).
The fact is, the market prefers cheap and buggy over expensive and reliable. If that upsets you, preach your message to the users, not the developers. The developers are only giving users what they want.
Well you sure have a point there! In fact I don't even know why this upsets me since I'm not even a client/user in that market! :) Maybe because I have the feeling that the free software I'm using can actually have more quality.. IMHO
Wow, 45Gigs of OS and Applications? Most likely none of which you can remove? So a backup of that takes up a whooping 5-11 DVDs (depending on whether dual layer or single layer)? Really? Are you out of your f-ing mind?
...in the GP's example...
See, the 'grandmother' part isn't the point. Some tech just works. THIS is the problem GP was trying to highlight, which your trollish counterpoint did not address at all:
"go out to the computer store _again_ to buy an external HD, lookup what a "recovery partition" is and what the procedure is to upload that to the external HD [she would call it the little box I guess]. Then find out which are the "chunks of space that is supposed to be a trial of Office" and how to get rid of this nonsens."
It's right after the 'grandma' part in the GP's post...see, that's why M$ products suck, and that when people make some dumb "just uninstall XYZ" as a supposed rebuttal to criticism of M$'s bad design they are really just trolling.
Thank you Dave Raggett
"I've read that on the RT version a registry key be edited to give full access to the SD card"
Not ready for the desktop, then.
Do you think grandma's going to open up regedit?
The games needed to be there and the OS too.
I never remember having to search the whole house when the OS CD was in the cd rack on the desk top.
Their flagship product is a $900 netbook with 23GB of free space, no keyboard and a rinky-dink 10" of screen real estate? Did Steve Ballmer discover Homer Simpson is his long-lost brother or something?
Well you sure have a point there! In fact I don't even know why this upsets me since I'm not even a client/user in that market! :) Maybe because I have the feeling that the free software I'm using can actually have more quality.. IMHO
Sorry, I think I came off a little hostile.
I do agree that there is some really high quality free software / open source software. I think that happens sometimes because much of that kind of software is a labor of love, instead of just profit. I know that I work really hard to polish my personal software projects because they are like my children.
Then again, I think some commercial software is higher quality than free software / open source software, too. My guess is it depends on how sexy the application is.
Sexy applications -- the ones that are fun to write -- tend to have high quality free software / open source software implementations.
It is the applications that aren't sexy that often see better commercial implementations, because not enough developers are interested in spending their free time to write free software / open source software that is not interesting to them.
Of course there are exceptions to those general observations as well.
But I do worry a bit when people think all software should be held to the same standard as, say, bridges or medical devices. Unless the software is critical (such as running a medical device, or handling security for a bank, or an OS kernel, etc.), then there is insufficient incentive to make it super reliable and robust. The market would punish you terribly for having less features and more cost.
There are limits to that, of course. If your application is a buggy mess, they'll reject it. It has to be "good enough", but often, "good enough" is still pretty buggy.
But I do worry a bit when people think all software should be held to the same standard as, say, bridges or medical devices. Unless the software is critical (such as running a medical device, or handling security for a bank, or an OS kernel, etc.), then there is insufficient incentive to make it super reliable and robust. The market would punish you terribly for having less features and more cost.
Well the way I see it, the market could keep costs while, for example, trading "innovation" for stability. Ever wondered what would happen if Microsoft would improve Windows XP's robustness until today, instead of revamping the whole thing at every release?
It's the same amount of space that Windows boxes always have to give up. Why would the Surface pro be any different? People who buy the Pro will almost certainly opt for the larger drive. Why the alarmist reaction?
But I do worry a bit when people think all software should be held to the same standard as, say, bridges or medical devices. Unless the software is critical (such as running a medical device, or handling security for a bank, or an OS kernel, etc.), then there is insufficient incentive to make it super reliable and robust. The market would punish you terribly for having less features and more cost.
Well the way I see it, the market could keep costs while, for example, trading "innovation" for stability. Ever wondered what would happen if Microsoft would improve Windows XP's robustness until today, instead of revamping the whole thing at every release?
Unfortunately, new versions are a necessary evil in many application domains. Gotta pay the employees.
Well done.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It is amazing what software companies can escape with, things that in other engineering fields would totally blast them companies with lawsuits. Can you imagine a civil engineer gradually patching structural inconsistencies in a bridge as they show up? Yikes!
I have a simple solution to that: stop calling people "software engineers". Start calling them "software fun-gineers" or something similar. Either that or start holding "software engineers" accountable in a fashion that they'll force companies to at least attempt to build structurally sound "bridges" instead of relying upon the patch-it-later approach. I mean, I still cringe when I heard the announcement of MS's whole "Patch Tuesday". Yes, me and others may bitch about just how bad MS software was in the past, but one can recall that sendmail used to be a steaming pile of vulnerabilities and eventually there was enough patches to change that. That MS effectively acknowledged that the situation wasn't going to get better so they may as well institutionalize their stucco patching regiment? *sigh*
PS - Yea, I realize there are some places where there are actually software engineers. But clearly too few people who graduate as Software Engineer are qualified for that and too many companies over-demand on those qualifications when they want nothing of the sort.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Just remember, you can always format c:
I can see the advertised storage being ~10% higher than actual useable space, but on the order of 50%??? That seems like a boneheaded move. come on MS...
This tablet comes with 80 trillion GB of memory. All but 15 GB are filled with nonexistence. You can still read all that memory tho. It's in /dev/zero.
"Can you imagine a civil engineer gradually patching structural inconsistencies in a bridge as they show up? Yikes!"
that's a shit analogy... a bridge serves one purpose - to allow flow of traffic up to a certain weight limit.
a typical interaction is - vehicle drives over bridge
your typical software application serves multiple purposes and has a lot of different interactions, some of which may not have been catered for because of an unexpected sequence of interactions - hence the need for patches. there is no such thing as a bug free software application.
No, it is amazing what Microsoft gets away with becaue some peopel will always buy M$ no matter what. What are the footprints of iOS on devices? Ever investigate? You'll be surprised.
> you could start by deleting the leftover installation source files
What's the I-T cost of doing that for 10,000 deployed Surface devices?
Reading the comments there seems to be a large number of people that have a serious problem with 23GB of free space. While only having a 64GB SSD may be considered small for a computer that sports a full featured OS, it isn't like Microsoft is the ONLY company on the planet to market a device using the total disk space instead of the post-OS installed disk space. Apple, Dell, IBM, Acer, Google they all do this. If you don't want 23GB of free space buy the 128GB or buy a new SSD, or buy a different device. If your interested Apple will sell you their "fusion" drive for $250, which is a 120GB SSD -talk about a rip off (See newegg for competitive pricing). Furthermore, for all the Apple fan boys out there they will sell you an i5 with 8GB of ram and a 1920x1080 monitor, and Geforce 640M (the MOBILE graphics card version in a desktop!!!) for $1299. You can get all this minus the glowing apple for about 700 dollars at newegg. But not to beat up apple too much, and back to the point, what are you planning to do with 23GB of free space? This is a surface Pro, it has a stylus input and runs Windows 8 native, this is built for enterprise level work and educational work. It isn't made to consume YouTube or other media, there are devices for that they are called iPads and Nexus. It isn't to play Crysis, you're not running MS SQL server your arn't doing Visual studio development. The idea is for business applications, inventory applications, Office, Email, Note taking in class, REAL Citrix receiver applications -(yes I have used the iPAD citrix it is terrible) these things don't require 23GB of space, if they do it still doesn't matter the idea even from Apple and Google is to sync with the cloud.
I am just curious what you think you're doing with 23GB of space at a productivity application level. Also note you are able to remove the rescue partition and pick up a bit more.
lesbian grandmothers. NICE.
EVERY manufacturer who has ever made any storage device, lies.
EVERY manufacturer who has ever made any storage device, lies.
EVERY manufacturer who has ever made any storage device, lies.
EVERY manufacturer who has ever made any storage device, lies.
EVERY manufacturer who has ever made any storage device, lies.
EVERY manufacturer who has ever made any storage device, lies.
They all lie.
Get used to it.
This should not be a surprising to anyone who has owned a Windows Device.
SSD storage is is reasonably priced now just skip 32 and 64GB and make 128 GB a minimum, especially in a full powered tablet.
You don't have to imagine that. That happens all the the time, mainly to fix unforeseen oscillation/resonance issues, but sometimes other issues come up (actuators for raising/lowering, lighting, road surface, etc).
Haha, formal verification, in actual software, haha. I'll give you my estimate for developing an office suite, 1 trillion dollars, that means they'd only have to charge about, what, a 100.000 dollars per license?
What? No 23GB should be enough for anyone?
Slashdot, I'm disappointed!
Quoting a memory storage number, then using a large chunk of it for the operating system is typical MS BS.
Why the surface doesn't have a seperate flash drive for os and apps and keep the user data on seperate flash chip...
Windows and remove unnecessary files, you probably aren't going to notice how much free space you have on your flash drive anyway.
/. crowd are still living in their mom's basements in 1996 !
The whole point is cloud compatibility; you don't need a TB of local storage anymore. Things have changed, though it's always interesting to note what proportions of the posting