Interesting little tidbit from the Reddit AMA session with Microsoft’s Surface team. One Redditor wondered just how much disk space Windows RT takes up – in other words, if you buy the 32GB Surface RT tablet, how much space is left for your stuff? It turns out that while Windows 8 RT is considerably smaller than its Windows 7 x86 predecessor, it’s still huge by mobile standards.
The 32bit version of Windows 7 required 16GB of hard drive space for a vanilla installation, so without any additional applications, and without Microsoft Office installed. Thanks to things like the page file, hibernate file, system restore points, and keeping updates locally on disk, Windows 7 consumed more space over time. Since Windows RT will be 32bit, it makes the most sense to keep the figures for 32bit Windows 7 in mind.
On Reddit, Microsoft’s Surface test manager, Ricardo Lopez, detailed how much space Windows RT will take up: 12GB. However, and this is crucial, this includes Office RT 2013, and “a bunch of apps”. In other words, it is considerably smaller than its closest predecessor.
However, this compares rather unfavourably to its competition. Anyone who has ever downloaded an Android ROM knows they’re about 130-150MB in size (at least, for CyanogenMod); the Android Compatibility Definition Document for Jelly Bean demands at least 340MB for kernel and userspace. I found it hard to find exact information on iOS – but it’s reported that it’s less than 1GB in size.
There’s some good reasons why it’s larger, though. First of all, Microsoft’s Office team was unable to create a Metro Office in time, and as such, even the RT version includes the entire old desktop stack – just to run Office (you can’t install anything else on the desktop). This most likely takes up a considerable amount of space. Whether or not this desktop stack is a good thing to have on a tablet is up to you (hint: it’s not).
On top of that – although I’m not sure – my guess is that Windows RT includes a heck of a lot more drivers than iOS and Android do. Supposedly, it’s as compatible with hardware as plain Windows, and I think that requires a lot more space for drivers than iOS and Android offer. Again – whether or not that’s a good thing is up to you (hint: it is).
I am left wondering how Windows RT handles the buildup of cruft. Even Windows 7 grew in size over time, with bits and pieces left behind all over the place. Those few additional GBs of wasted space might not be an issue on machines with terabyte hard drives, but on a 32GB Surface, that’s going to add up. Will users be dumped to the desktop to use that horrid ‘free up space’-wizard? On a tablet?
That’d be fun.
The “12GB” number is AFTER installing the full version of Office and numerous apps, to quote the source.
That still way more than it should be. I wonder what it actually is there that’s taking so horribly much storage space. Even worse when the OS takes a third of all storage on the whole system. Curious.
It’s probobly their “shared libraries” folder [It’s called WinSxS in Windows 7, IIRC], or some RT counterpart of it.
These guys surely don’t know how to write the code that is both compact and portable.
The WinSxS folder does not take up any additional space. It’s almost all hardlinks.
Yeah, right… That one folder is a constant problem on computers with smaller drives (SSD for example). WinSXS consumes 7-8 GB of space on both my computers that have been installed quite recently. After some heavy usage and more apps installed, that folder grows up to 11-16 gigabytes!
Edited 2012-10-20 12:21 UTC
For those who don’t know:
http://www.davidlenihan.com/2008/11/winsxs_disk_space_usage_its_no….
Hardlink don’t actually takes space.
It is? Come on, this is Windows we’re talking about here. It has a longtime reputation of being joked about due to the fact that with every release comes even more bloat and in turn higher system requirements. Clearly that’s still the case–either Microsoft is lazy, the chip manufacturers are paying them to keep specs high, or both (I’m betting on both…). I’m not saying that Mac OS X or Linux is any better (well, there are some exceptions in Linux with certain window managers…) , but seriously… the fact that Windows for traditional PCs is a pig is well-known.
I just think it’s highly ironic that what Windows 8 is is basically a tablet/cell phone-type OS designed with traditional PC hardware in mind, yet its x86 version requires even *more* memory and hard drive space than Windows 7. With the extreme drop in functionality provided by Metro, I’d expect an equivalent drop in specs… but I guess this is Microsoft we’re talking about. The fact that the ARM version is so heavy doesn’t surprise me the least bit… it’s from the same damn code base. It would be different if it was actually a separate OS like Windows CE was, but it’s not.
Bloat word is banded around yet again.
It is called features. Normally even my basic web code triples in size after putting in all the error, logging and debugging symbols.
I honestly don’t believe many people on this website write code or if they do it isn’t very robust.
I don’t write code but bloat is undeniable and if those who do don’t find the growth of bloat an issue I despair.
Nevermind applications for the moment, just consider the growth in Windows OS size , if that’s down to ‘features’ what radical new features have we seen from Windows this last decade to account for it. Most everything ‘radical’ I can recall microsoft has tried to do with the OS has been shelved and we’ve just had evolutionary iterations, some better than others, of the code base. It is something and one expects a cost in size…..but, how long can this continue?
Bloat is a word used by people who usually have no idea what they are talking about.
The inner workings of the OS has been pretty much been overhauled since XP while keeping backwards compatibility (this includes bugs in previous version as well).
I can assure you that this is extremely difficult to do.
Possibly why Win RT is smaller than the predecessors’.
I disagree… I would not necessarily call all features bloat. Some things are just completely unnecessary and that’s what I refer to as bloat. Of course, what that is varies to everyone, but the reality is Windows tries to do everything for everyone so it’s full of tons of crap, whether you want it or not. When something takes up more resources (drive space, processing power, memory) than needed (for unwanted things), I call that bloat.
Prime example: Two completely conflicting graphical user environments designed for totally different types of computers, with the more functional one being purposely made more inconvenient to use to get everyone to switch to the touchscreen-type UI. And if Windows has been getting tons of useful features, then it doesn’t seem to have much to show for. Metro sure isn’t what I’d call feature-packed.
When I can’t run even the 32-bit version of what appears to be a glorified mobile OS/traditional desktop OS hybrid in a virtual machine with less than a gig of RAM and about 16 gigs virtual drive capacity… now that’s what I call bloated.
Oh, you write “web code” and think “debugging symbols” should be part of a final public release. That’s cute… you are totally qualified to trash other people’s coding abilities.
Edited 2012-10-22 02:00 UTC
In the web.config, they are turned off an ignored by the CLR when you set the debug=false or compile for “RELEASE”.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2010trainingcourse_webdevelopment…
Oh well … OSNEWS … lots of people pretending they know things.
Also if I am talking about JavaScript, yes it is perfectly ok leaving debug symbols in there.
Edited 2012-10-22 19:18 UTC
Uh, my article states that quite clearly.
EDIT: ah, you mean the title. Fixing!
Edited 2012-10-19 20:32 UTC
And it’s not even 12 GB. It’s actually 9.8 GiB.
I can’t believe nobody has pointed this out yet.
What Microsoft actually said on that Reddit thread was that “After the OS, OfficeRT and a bunch of apps, you will still have more that 20GB.” Thus, they did not say that disk usage was 12 GB. They said that free space was 20 GB.
Ah, but how did he get that free space figure? Probably in Windows Explorer — which reports free disk space in binary gibibytes, even though it uses the “GB” abbreviation. Yet flash memory is sold using decimal gigabytes. My “128 GB” SSD is reported as “119 GB [= GiB]” in Windows Explorer.
A 32 GB flash drive = 29.8 GiB. If you have “more than 20 [GiB]” of free space remaining, then that means the entire running system takes up 9.8 GiB of space, not 12.
Now let us dissect the 9.8 GiB still further. What do you get on Windows RT that you don’t get on iOS?
– Office RT. My x86 Office 2013 is 2 GiB, but Office RT includes fewer applications. Assume Office RT takes up 1.0 GiB.
– Drivers. My x64 Windows 8 install has 0.8 MiB of drivers, but Windows RT has a reduced driver set. Call it 0.5 GiB.
– Fonts, many of them bundled with Office. My install has 0.3 MiB of fonts. Fonts don’t shrink when ported to ARM.
If you accept that these are worth the 1.8 GiB they take up, then we’re now down to 8 GiB that can really be attributed to Windows RT and “a bunch of apps.”
That includes the pagefile (about 1 GiB on a system with 2 GiB RAM), IMEs for a whole boatload of languages (the dictionaries for simplified Chinese alone are about 60 MB), etc.
Edited 2012-10-20 01:25 UTC
AFAIK SSDs do actually report the space correctly. What actually happens is not the entire SSD volume is available to fill; some is always reserved for load wearing (thus extending the lifetime of the unit).
The reason being that SSDs use a CoW method (copy-on-write) and if you had a full SSD, then there’s less free block to write each fs update too. Thus you’re forced to recycle the same blocks (which is very bad for the lifetime of solid state drives). However as modern SSDs keep a little bit of space back, it means there’s a greater pool of free blocks to balance the writing across.
So a 120GB SSD does actually have 120GB of storage but you’re only allowed to fill ~120GB as the remainer is there purely for load wearing.
I hope that makes sense, i should have been in bed 2 hours ago so it’s probably not the clearest post I’ve made lol
That the 7% overprovisioning factor happens to be the same as the difference between GiB and GB is a nice coincidence. But it’s just that — a coincidence.
The coincidence disappears when you look at drives that have RAISE. See, e.g., the 960 GB OWC Mercury Electra MAX 3G SSD: http://www.anandtech.com/show/6038/owc-releases-960gb-mercury-elect…
It has 1024 GiB of raw capacity, and 894 GiB of formatted capacity. The difference is not 7% but 14% — and it’s because some of the raw capacity is reserved for RAISE as well as overprovisioning.
They’re advertising this as a 960 GB drive (= 894 GiB), not as a 1024 GB or a 1 TB drive. In other words, they’re not advertising the raw capacity in binary prefixes, but the formatted capacity in decimal SI prefixes.
Magnetic hard drives also had a higher raw capacity than formatted, as did floppy disks. Because the difference wasn’t anywhere close to the 5% difference between MiB/MB or the 2.4% difference between KiB/KB, the urban legend did not have a chance to spawn as it did with SSDs.
(Trick question: Why are 1.44 MB floppies called that? They’re neither 1.44 decimal MB, nor 1.44 binary MiB, nor 1440 decimal KB, nor 1440 binary KiB.)
Edited 2012-10-20 02:15 UTC
Hi,
As far as I know, all magnetic storage manufacturers have always used “dodgy numbers” – a combination of binary and decimal. A “dodgy MB” is 1024*1000 bytes, which is slightly larger than a real MB and slightly smaller than a real MiB. A “dodgy GB” is 1024*1000*1000 bytes, a “dodgy TB” is 1024*1000*1000*1000 bytes, etc.
To add to the confusion, there’s “unformatted capacity” (what the magnetic material is capable of), “low level formatted capacity” (what the magnetic material is capable of storing after it’s been split up into sectors) and “formatted capacity” (how much free space you’re left with after you’ve put the overhead of a file system on it).
For a simple example; a “1.44 MB” floppy disk has an unformatted capacity of about 2 MB, a “low level formatted” capacity of exactly 1440 KiB, and (depending on which file system you use) this probably drops to about 1300 KiB of free/usable space once a file system is slapped on it.
Of course everything else used for storage (RAM, file sizes, etc) is typically measured in binary sizes (e.g. 8 GiB of RAM); and there are still many morons that use decimal prefixes for binary sizes (e.g. 8 GB of RAM); so it’s natural for people to assume a dodgy TB is a binary TiB and wonder why they’ve been ripped off. In this case the manufacturers like to pretend that file system overhead is the only cause, instead of admitting that their dodgy number scheme is a deliberate scam.
Now; the difference between “dodgy” and “decimal” is constant (e.g. a decimal MB is 2.4% smaller than a dodgy MB, and a decimal PB is 2.4 smaller than a dodgy PB). However, the difference between “dodgy” and “binary” increases with scale (e.g. a dodgy MB is 2.4% smaller than a binary MiB, and a dodgy PB is 9.95% smaller than a binary PiB).
This means that as hard drives get larger, the “dodgy sizes that people naturally assume are a binary sizes” scam grows. For example, by the time we get to yottabytes people will be getting 18% less disk space than they assume they’re getting.
The simplest solution is to hunt down these morons that use decimal prefixes for binary sizes and “re-educate them with extreme force”. Once people get used to binary sizes they’ll start assuming that a dodgy MB is a real MB; and then people will get more disk space than they assumed they would from hard disk manufacturers.
TL;DR: The problem can be solved with violence!
– Brendan
They’re not exactly morons. GiB and MiB vs GB and MB is a very, very recent invention. The computer industry always described memory and hard drive storage in terms of Mega/Giga/Kilo- + byte and defined that as 1024 KB (in your world, KiB) = 1MB (again, MiB to you), etc. The Kibi/Mibi/Gibi prefix was invented well after the other standard had been established for over 20 years.
So, basically, the IEC standard prefixed (est circa, 1999) are the “new” kid on the block, versus the old school non SI prefixes (circa ???, but certainly in use from the late 60’s, probably earlier.)
The whole “ibibyte” nomenclature should be dropped as far as I’m concerned.
It may be syntactically correct in terms of the metric prefixes v binary etc. But all their introduction has done is cause massive confusion as different storage units utilise the term in different ways (i.e. HDD use metric GB, while RAM uses binary).
The “ibibyte” usage was just a result of HDD manufacturers adopting it to enable them to sell a 1TB drive, that was “technically” 1TB, but was actually about 92GB less than that, according to Windows, and pretty much everyone else that studied Computer Science up until that point!
When I studied, a gigabyte was 1024-cubed bytes. Metric system be damned.
Just ask Google:
http://tinyurl.com/93y3m4b
Edited 2012-10-22 03:17 UTC
It is also known to grows in size over time.
This can be because of installation files being left over even if the application is uninstalled.
To make it worse, there is no easy way to know which installation files can be removed (already uninstalled apps for example) and which are needed(e.g. to uninstall app or add a component – which is a bad way to deal with it anyway)
WinRT uses the new application store, so maybe it no longer suffers from this, but it was certainly not the only reason why Windows takes up way too much space. It looks like vast disk space on modern machines spoiled OS developers too much, especially as dumping information to disk is sometimes an easy workaround over a more complex problem.
Btw. are there going to be 16GB WinRT tablets? I hope not.
Interesting. Under what circumstances are installers left over after applications are uninstalled?
I’ve noticed that a lot of installers extract to a temporary directory, and then forget to delete it when the MSI finishes running. But this has nothing to do with uninstall — they eat up the disk space even if you never uninstall the app.
The \Windows\Installer directory should clean up after itself. It’s those pesky temporary directories that bootstrappers extract into that tend to hang around.
Sometimes MSI will leave files to “aid uninstallation”. IIRC, Borland did this with Delphi 2005. It was very annoying. Something to do with a catalogue of files installed or similar. I’ve also encountered at least one installer that did the same so that features could be “installed on the fly” without the original medial being present. Some installers are just crap though and son’t clean up properly.
Not just sometimes. Every MSI installer (yes, Microsoft Installer Installer…) you run is copied and stored inside your Windows folder with a cryptic name slapped on it, because the MSI file is also the uninstaller for a program. You run into problems when, even after uninstalling a program, that file doesn’t disappear.
As an aside, a problem I have to deal with at work on a semi-frequent basis occurs when some clever fool finds and decides to clean up this dozens-of-gigabytes folder of installers. Pretty much the only programs that seem to have a problem with that are iTunes and Quicktime, which apparently can’t update without the old installer there to remove the old program. The solution is to use a Microsoft tool that removes all of the registry entries pertaining to iTunes and Quicktime, so Windows just no longer knows it’s installed, and the new version’s installer can run unimpeded.
“There’s some good reasons why it’s larger, though.”
Well, no, they aren’t good reasons. (And you state so yourself in the case of the former.) These are excuses. (In the case of the former “reason,” we are too slow, confused, and/or lazy to actually have developed software targeted for this platform yet so we did a hack job — will you please develop a native app for our platform, we’ll pay you?) As to the later excuse, I find it rather disingenuous at best. Are you claiming there are 11GBs of drivers? No, of course not. While Windows 7 has done a better job of including a core set of generic drivers, how often do each of us find that many, many device drivers still need to be installed? So, really, one only needs to ask how much space do included drivers take up on Windows 7 now? (My guess: less than 1GB; certainly far, far, far less than 10GB.) And then one could continue to ask how likely is it the majority of these drivers are going to be needed? (Don’t need to include additional modem, ethernet, wifi, bluetooth, hard or optical drivers beyond what either Microsoft or an OEM is installing, etc… You will essentially only need drivers for anything that may interface via usb or wireless — printers, input devices, etc.) So are we talking about unnecessary bloat — even when additional drivers are very likely to be a very small percentage of this 12GB?
Edited 2012-10-19 20:49 UTC
EDIT: Replied to the wrong post, or other weirdness.
Edited 2012-10-19 22:24 UTC
Uh, in comparison to Linux, Windows is terrible about generic drivers. Remember, every single USB optical mouse or keyboard with any sort of reprogramability has its own driver. A lot of these from the same manufacturer use the same software, sure, but that is still a lot of drivers. Windows 7 might have better handling of USB drives and wireless network cards, but quite a few categories of devices will cause Win 7 to automatically install the manufacturer’s needlessly proprietary driver. Oh, and let us not forget all those programs that install kernel drivers.
Now, most of those drivers are not included on the default install, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some windows machines had 5-10GB of drivers.
Because although some vendors support particular standards they also develop their hardware so that they go beyond just those standards. For example I have a Logitech C920 webcam which is UVC compliant but to access all the features you need to have the Logitech driver install. Another example of that would be printers where a printer might support the ‘XML Paper Specification’ but require additional drivers to then the end user can be notified as to the level of ink remaining or provide diagnostic information when things go wrong. Then there are those vendors who quite frankly ‘don’t give a damn’ and simply ignore the standards or implement them in a broken way thus making the built in generic ones complete pointless (Linux/*BSD btw suffers from the same problem, even when the driver conforms to 100% of the specification the driver developers then have to spend time programming around dumb decisions made by the hardware engineers at said widget company).
As for the installation size, it will be interesting to see where it being used but with that being said the comparison (by some) between the iPad and Surface is silly given that the Surface allows expansion where as with the iPad when you run out of storage you’re ‘shit out of luck’. I’d sooner give up some ‘thinness’ for the sake of having expandability thus enable the ‘life’ of the product to go beyond simply a refresh cycle or two.
Standard webcam driers are often better performing, anyway …while manufacturer-provided largely just give useless trinkets.
WRT printers – yay for artificial segmentation, I suppose (because, with present tech & its costs, it would be probably trivial to equip entire product line with Ethernet/WiFi/BT – and include a diagnostic & configuration webpage, like in routers)
A very of Windows only doesn’t support drivers that weren’t available at the time of release.
Most of my hardware comes from the Vista era, so everything has a standard driver. I usually make sure I get the updated Nvidia Driver for my graphics card.
The same statement would be valid to any distro released image or BSD install image. If the hardware is newer than the OS disk you are installing it from, you will have to newer drivers or use very generic (VESA etc).
Of course 12GB is too much, but it’s actually better than other choice: not having a Windows ARM version at all.
I’ve checked my current Windows 7 installation with TreeSize (great utlity btw). I have 64 bit windows, Office 2010 + 2013 Beta + Visual Studio, and a bunch of other things.
This is the breakdown:
28GB Windows
– 8.5G Installer files
– 8GB WinSxS (backwards compatibility)
– 3.6GB System32
– 2GB Assembly (.net native images for v2 and v4 for both 32 and 64 bits)
– 1.2GB temp
– 1.2GB SysWOW64 (32 bits compatibility)
– 1GB Software Distribution
– 1GB Microsoft.Net
– 500MB Fonts
– and the rest totals less than 1GB
10GB System Volume Information (shadow copies and system restore)
1.3GB MSOCache (Office setup files)
I’ve skipped over program files, and user data
Out of these system files, at least 32GB of ~40GB is redundant and useless stuff (for example I don’t need 4 different versions of .Net).
Even if we included Office in this mix (it usually takes ~2GB installation space), we’d still have a total of 10-11GB actual useful non-redundant resources.
That means Microsoft has not actually done much to reduce this clutter, except for porting the code to ARM (which is important by itself).
You must have every font known to mankind.
Why? No one cares about Windows on ARM. People care about Windows purely because of the installed base of x86 specific applications. Beyond that there isn’t much use for it.
I’m not convinced they can do much about it. Windows is an interconnected homogeneous system. You take it or leave it.
I just did some testing with Windows Server 2008 R2 yesterday. A normal installation takes 12GB, while a core installation takes 2GB only.
If WinRT didn’t have to pull in all the desktop stuffs, I think it would be much smaller.
A core installation has nothing in it. It shouldn’t even be 2GB. I’m looking at a Linux system right now with Apache, running various PHP sites and a monitoring system (all on the same volume) – 2.5GB.
While I don’t like talking about ‘bloat’ because as software develops it’s inevitably going to get larger, in this case on these devices it matters. Microsoft quite clearly can do very little about it.
Well, the point is that it does because, as I’d said, Windows is extremely interconnected.
Several gigabytes for a base install of an OS on a dedicated device that has limited disk space to start with is just not acceptable.
It actually has everything except desktop. So desktop related stuffs take up 10G.
It doesn’t. You’ll have to add roles which will add to that install size significantly.
They did reduce the size of W7 to W8, but yeah, once they did that, they ported W8 to ARM without trying to make further reductions, which seems the prudent move to me.
Given the space available on these devices forgive me if I say that it doesn’t seem prudent at all.
You lost me here. I guess competition is good as long as they are playing fair (they have a poor history).
Any company in position, with such possibilities, would probably act more or less similar. And anyway, their competition was also simply stupid and/or a worse choice: http://www.osnews.com/thread?522221 (plus, Gang of Nine preferred to deal with MS than yield to IBM)
So its 12GB… That essentially wipes out the 2x the storage arguments when compared to an iPad. I’ll note that in the future.
I also agree that the desktop mode, which only matters to allow Office and Explorer to run for the most part, is an unfortunate blight on what would otherwise seem to be a pretty good pure tablet experience.
I understand why they did it (sort of), but I still question it over the long haul. If they would have allowed native ARM apps for desktop mode it would have been totally different, but as it is now they have (to me) artificially made desktop mode uncompelling for Surface RT. I still have hope they will pull an Apple and release an ARM SDK for writing full desktop apps in the future. They made desktop mode stupid through policy – it’s not stupid in and of itself though…
Which brings me to the fact that this is all specific to Surface RT…
I think the arguments for Surface Pro are completely different. Desktop mode will not be a hindrance, it will be an extremely compelling feature.
The way I see it, Surface Pro won’t be a tablet – it will be a notebook with a detachable zero-footprint keyboard that can function as a tablet OR a notebook without having to make major compromises for either. Same form factor as a tablet, same usability (for Metro Apps), but the most compelling feature is that you can (at will) use it as if it were a notebook for content creation work, with a full desktop UI and a keyboard and mouse.
Surface Pro wont be an iPad competitor – it will be a Macbook Air competitor (priced accordingly)… But the value of it is if you buy one you essentially get a tablet thrown in for free.
I don’t think that Surface RT is a dud by any means, I just think it is less interesting than the Pro version (which is why I’m waiting for the Pro to come out before buying one). If there are enough good Metro apps RT could certainly hold its own, but its long term future is completely tied to how good the apps are. Surface Pro is less dependent on Metro apps to be compelling.
Which is why I never understood why they did RT first… They should have did the Pro version first and let their app store build up to the point that RT would become compelling because of the available apps. I think they did the launch backwards, but hey – what do I know?
This seems to me to be a good example of Microsoft’s lack of shrewd marketing when compared to Apple…
If this were an Apple product the base model would be marketed as having 16GB of storage, the high end model would have 48GB (or maybe 20GB and 50GB, but consumers seem to really like base-16 integers for some reason I still don’t fathom)…
It creates a larger perceived advantage for the higher end model (i.e. 3x the storage), and gives them the advantage of being able to say that ALL of the reported storage is accessible to users. More importantly, it makes the fact that the OS image uses 12GB of space (which is fricken’ huge) mostly irrelevant (since your not really paying for it).
As it is now, proclaiming the thing has 32GB of storage looks like a lie buried in the truth. This might become a scandal, and its ashamed because it has nothing to do with the product, its purely an issue with the messaging.
Regarding native desktop ARM applications – good question. Even if their argument is “well, Surface is only a tablet” there is also the possibility of traditional laptops appearing with ARM CPU’s, there might even be more adventurous hardware vendors willing to sell ARM based desktops such as an ultra-thin ‘all in one’ computer thus would necessitate the ability to run traditional desktop applications be they ported from x86 win32 to ARM win32.
The dream I do have is that maybe Windows 8 with WinRT is the first step in WinRT being a framework for both traditional desktop applications and metro ones. I’d love that to be the case and Windows 8 merely being pushed out there as something for the ‘tablets’ with Windows 9 being an upgrade that targets both platforms but I have been disappointed in the past hence I keep my optimism very sober.
They seem to be redefining the golden standard for the “embedded” systems. From now one everyone will have to use boatload of disk space. Not using it? fill it with garbage! you need to fill into the MS standards.
Yeah, they are pretty hilarious. They surely have no clue what “embedded” means.
I’m actually constantly amazed on how they even manage to sell their crappy toys and toy OSs. This is beyond me.
Um.. Where do they even call it an embedded system?
Mircosoft is trying to use the exact same platform for both portal computing devices and traditional notebooks and desktops… Of course it isn’t an embedded system.
Well, it’s clearly the sort of system that has different requirements to a desktop.
They’re going to fail. They’ve tried with this angle of putting Windows everywhere, and because Windows is on desktops everyone will use it everywhere else.
I am left wondering how Windows RT handles the buildup of cruft.
It’ll handle it just like Windows always has… it won’t!
Every version of desktop Windows grows over time, and it’s up to the user to find and run tools to fix it (if you rely on “Desktop Cleanup” you’re system will be monstrous after Windows updates.) I wouldn’t expect anything different with Win 8.
Yes, exactly. And I’ve found the ultimate solution and switched to Slackware. There are all kinds of tools available around. It’s only up to the users to figure out. However, it is arguably not-quite-feasible to the majority.
Gotta love BeOS + GoBe Office
So damn true…think of the children, just say no.
Android has it’s own share of brain damage when it comes to storage. Storage space is divided into pieces (partitions) of fixed size (why not just have folders?). Did the partition the apps go to fill up? It doesn’t matter if you have plenty of free space in the other partitions. No more apps for you. Did the /sdcard partition (where your user data go) filled up? You can’t use any of those free GBs the other partitions have.
So, OEMs have a balance of ying and yang to do, with the more space they give to apps, the less is available for photos, vids and the like. This is back to the dark ages of Unix partitions, even linux doesn’t require a seperate partition for system anymore. It uses folders. My dad’s Xperia U has only 4GB of it’s 8GB available for user data *sigh*
PS: Yes I know most apps can install most of their stuff to /sdcard, but Android’s partitions are stiil brain damaged, and OEMs still give huge sizes to the other partitions, thinking they are doing the user a service.
Edited 2012-10-21 00:36 UTC
I believe that’s actually only the case on pre-4.0, and there is actually a technical reason for it. For user access to the filesystem via e.g. a PC, the older revisions only supported the USB mass storage protocol, which uses block-level access to the underlying partition. This means that while the latter’s mounted for use via USB, it’s inaccessible to the OS itself, which is why system and apps were partitioned off separately. In 4.0 and up MTP is supported which means this kind of separation is no longer necessary, e.g. on my Galaxy Nexus all of the on-board flash storage is available for apps and data (minus the overhead of the OS install).
In any case, even on older android revisions there was never a “partition per app”, there was just one system partition for the OS and one apps partition for everything else, + possibly the sd card partition if your phone supported it.
Edited 2012-10-21 12:42 UTC
And you think that there’s actually something wrong with this? If you do, then more fool you.
We had the kind of filesystem layout like you’re “advocating” on things called Floppy Disks and you were really and totally screwed when your OS system files got trashed in one fashion or another.
There’s a reason they got moved into their own partitions, and it looks like losers like yourself are going to have to learn *THAT* lesson all over again.
If the system files are on a different folder, with different permissions (exactly like Linux does it), then nothing can be “trashed”, unless it’s the OS itself doing the trashing (due to a bug or something), which in that case having a separate partition won’t help, because the OS could as well trash the filesystem in that partition.
I don’t know why I am answering this, as you are obviously either an old-school Unix neckbeard that has already reached the conclusion that Unix always did everything perfectly and working backwards from there to find “reasons” why Unix did things the way it did (even for things it doesn’t do anymore), or a troll. The rude way you talk can be attributed to either of the two.
Many thanks for the answer. Having to split the storage space into pieces sucks, so I am glad Android doesn’t need it anymore.
Edited 2012-10-22 12:57 UTC
Quite sure that most of it is XP an 7 code.
On the good consequences:
Wall gardening will make
a less ‘problematic’ platform,
from the user view.
The most immediate danger for Microsoft:
company size.
Does kinda make you wonder where this is going. Can remember Win 3 + Office 6 and since we’ve just had some horrendous exponential (if not more) of code bloat only just about offset by the increased power of PC’s. Yes, the bloat has included some cool stuff for users but the cool stuff (IMH0) is slowing, as is the power of hardware but the bloat isn’t.
Now we’re supposedly going towards a post-desktop ecosystem with cool, if not so powerful, tablets and Microsoft’s answer is to drag the humungous bloat windows has become and say this is it…..the wonderful new future for windows………It doesn’t compute, damn madness.
Google at least, with it’s new chromebook is actually offloading, for good or ill, a lot of the bloat now and in the future to the cloud…which at least makes some kinda sense.
Edited 2012-10-21 16:01 UTC
Where it’s going is that as time goes on, “mobile” OSes are going to be full OSes. WinRT is the ARM version of W8, not an OS derived from WP8. There’s no real reason that the ARM version of W8 would be that much smaller than the intel version.
And Microsoft is not allowing any WinRT to be installed on anything less than 32GB storage, so the smallest WinRT device is guaranteed to have 20GB available at the start.
You’re looking at the past through very rose-tinted glasses.* Past software was generally way more unstable, did a lot of less, cost more (especially taking into account whole package, together with sufficiently fast hardware), was notoriously insecure.
Present software is simply much better. And WRT hardware – a half+ decade dualcore (virtually any dualcore) machine is more than good enough for virtually any kind of consumer software. A decade old machine is also still quite fine, if some minimal care is taken when selecting current software for it (as in: you’ll still be able to use current software, with current capabilities). That was virtually unheard of in the past… (a decade-old PC in 1995 or 2000 or 2005 would a total junk)
It’s ironic (but telling, shows how much thought you put into your views) how you praise Google Chromebooks – which depend entirely on a browser, a category of software that doesn’t have the most efficient way of doing things…
*why won’t you crawl into that hole of the 80s, with hardly any OS to speak of and memory sizes measured in kilobytes?
Edited 2012-10-27 00:07 UTC
QNX had a wonderful 1.44Mb floppy with gui os and some apps.
MenuetOS has a similar but not as small footprint.
Why can’t other OS’s be equally small and therefor fast?
I honestly wonder whether trolling or stupid when I see these comments.
What a jerk!
Lets compare a real time operating system to a general purpose operating system … and say they are equivalent.
“It turns out that while Windows 8 RT is considerably smaller than its Windows 7 x86 predecessor, it’s still huge by mobile standards.”
That’s because Windows RT isn’t a “mobile” OS, per se, it’s the ARM version of W8, which is an OS that runs desktop computers, laptops, tablets (but not phones). So it’s not going to be as small as a phone OS like iOS, WP7/8, Android.
Windows bloat? There’s a shocker!
According to this article (http://www.geek.com/articles/news/windows-minwin-runs-in-40-mb-of-m…) MinWin which I believe is the new WinRT is only like 40 mb. That means its all the drivers, fonts, tools, and old WinAPIs that cause the size.
Another form of Android storage brain damage is the cooliris thumbnail cache (cooliris is the company Google subcontracted the Gallery app to, or something like that).
http://imageshack.us/a/img96/8236/cooliriscache.jpg
The cache grows and grows until it reaches sizes of >1GB (if you have the phone for a year or more), even on days when you are not adding, moving or deleting files. For a company that is so skimpy when it comes to storage (the european Galaxy Nexus has only 16GB of storage), Google surely makes OSes that have a huge appetite for GBs.
BTW to fix this, plug your phone to your PC via USB, enable USB storage (or whatever you do to make /sdcard appear as a USB drive), delete the folder pictured above, disable USB storage, wait for Android to scan media, and then reboot. There, you just got >1GB of storage free, and without messing up anything (the Gallery isn’t affected by this).
Generally, how could Google mess up thumbnails so much in Android? It’s not rocket science, even Symbian S60v2 did it right. Android and it’s default apps poop thumbnail caches pretty much everywhere (even inside the DCIM folder), and never clean them up.
Windows may take up more space when installing, but then it chews GBs much slower than Android.