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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.
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.
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...
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.
"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 >+
Unfortunately use of a recovery partition is central to MS' backup and recovery strategy for Windows 8. The ability to create a backup of arbitrary files or a disk image is deprecated; you can't even get Previous Versions for files outside of your libraries. Instead you're meant to have an offline cache of Previous Versions (File History) and sign in using a Microsoft account. If you have a failure you're instructed to reinstall from the recovery partition. Then you're meant to restore your apps from the Windows Store, and their settings from your Microsoft Account.
Quite what you're meant to do if you have a hard drive failure and/or (like every Windows user in existence) most of your apps are Desktop-based and therefore are neither recoverable from the store, nor able to sync their settings to the Microsoft Account, is an exercise for the reader.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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?
Um, no. A comparable situation would be if McDonald's advertised that that their McNuggets Lunch-a-rama had 12 nuggets, but when you buy one you only got 7. Their explanation being that the server has to eat some, too. At least McDonald's has the decency to admit that their Quarter Pounder is *pre-cooked weight. MS could do the same by saying pre-OS storage. However, if the Quarter Pounder was delivered at less than 2 oz, I think there would be an uproar.
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.
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!
I have never used the recovery partition on any computer I used. Of course, YMMV, since I always wipe a new computer and install the OS from a crapware-free copy.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
The whole point of Pro is for Professionals. This was supposed to be the workhorse Surface product that developers would conceivably use to develop a new generation of Windows Apps directly on a tablet target device. No more emulators, no more having to grab a second device and copy the software to it to test. The problem with only having a limited amount of "fast" storage available to professionals is it is woefully not enough to do professional things, like compile software or other content creation tasks. That 22 gb doesn't even take into consideration how much Visual Studio would consume before even getting to work on a project. Even the 128gb version is inadequate, i have over 40gb of project data on my work computer at any given time, and that is even being conservative with only checking out the projects I am directly working on. Sure, you could conceivably use external USB storage, but come on, what is the point of a highly portable tablet if you have to plug wires into it all the time.
No, there is no excuse for this. Microsoft missed the target audience with this by not even starting storage at a conservative 128 gb.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
They didn't mention the 32GB Surface for users on a budget. When you get that one, you actually owe them 9 GB.
You're thinking of the regular Surface. The Surface Pro has full Win8 on it.
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
Unless you're a total novice you shouldn't be using the recovery partition anyway. That puts all the crapware back on your system.
No, I have two of them.
I actually did the math right: 64 - 23 = 41. My mistake was typographical, not mathematical.
you could start by deleting the leftover installation source files
While there's an easy way to copy the recovery information, there is no user-friendly way to delete it from the original machine. Microsoft intends for almost all Windows users to leave it in place.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
the HDD installed on the machine didn't need to waste space with the disk image hiding on it.
The main reason the hardware OEMs started deploying these recovery partitions was for an improved customer experience. If you needed to re-install the OS you didn't need to search your house for the recovery DVD - All you needed to do was press F11 (or whatever) on boot and the installer would run. If you wanted to create your own recovery DVD it was pretty easy - In fact most of my computers nagged me to to do it.
So does this mean that the SD card counts as "internal" memory, or does it act as if it were an external drive?
Someone *please correct me if I am wrong*, but AFAIK, on Android devices, it is *effectively* an external drive, and you have to manually move things on/off of the expansion memory, and most if not all things cannot be run/used directly off of the expansion memory.
Which means you DO care.