Windows devices can be lightweight and highly mobile, yet, when you need it, have the full capabilities of the Windows OS. The Windows Storage and Deployment Teams, the people who bring modern storage APIs, Storage Sense, setup, and servicing to your phone, tablet, laptop, and desktop would like to introduce you to how they are giving Windows 10 a compact footprint.
Now that Windows runs on all manners of devices – from cheap phones to expensive gaming rigs – Windows’ storage footprint is even more important than it already was. I’m glad Microsoft isn’t losing sight of these lower-level things while working on Windows 10’s user-facing features.
That being said, the measures detailed in the blog post look an awful lot like treating the symptoms instead of the actual cause.
Did you mean you were glad Microsoft isn’t losing site of the low-level things?
Sincerely,
I thought I was going to read something like removing trash files, cleaning up binaries, purging libraries, etc.
BUT (there’s always a ‘but’) they are selling *compression of files* and *deletion of recovery* as *improvements* (I remember doing so in W98 or W-ME).
Another loss of time…
Yeah, I’m kind of miffed by this whole thing. Compressing system files isn’t exactly something new or anything to get excited over, plenty of OSes have done that in the past and you can even already enable the compression-flag on your system-drive in existing Windows-systems. Sure, if it does actually lessen the footprint then it’s probably welcome, but they really should do more than that.
As for the deletion of the recovery..now, that one seems actually a pretty bone-headed thing to do. They’re going to re-build Windows from the files that you were already using, but how, exactly, is that going to repair a Windows-system where some of the files have been lost or damaged? You can “refresh” your system as long as everything is working fine, but what use is it once the system isn’t working any longer? What if some of the files are infected with a virus? How many people actually need a “refresh” so much more than a real recovery that this is in any way justified?
That’s largely because the cause isn’t entirely in that one group’s hands. The development teams at Microsoft are departmented teams that have their own feifdoms and often don’t like having others meddling with their turf. There was a blog post a while back from a Windows kernel developer on why performance on Windows has been largely flat or on the decline for many years. DirectX 12’s early numbers aside, I’ve not seen much in the way of numbers that suggest 10 is going to be different inside where CPU & I/O bound processes are concerned.
Here’s the blog post I mentioned. Took a few moments to track it down as the original was removed.
http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=74
“Our performance isn’t an existential threat to the business.”
The size of the base OS is a financial motive because phones and tablets have much smaller storage capacities than desktops currently. But what happens when that’s no longer true and a phone’s solid state storage becomes sufficient to hold a “full featured” OS? Same thing that’s already happened, the financial incentive is removed to be space efficient resulting in the current 15 GB install base for Windows.
Edited 2015-03-16 22:37 UTC
Thank you, that blog post is a fascinating read even though I really understand maybe a half of it.
Windows 10 running on all devices, you say?
It’s as true as OS X running on iPhone was true in 1997. The mobile OS reuses part of the kernel and some of the driver infrastructure (like usb).
But basically, they’re different OS’s, but with some current improvements in the skinning – highly liked by the marketing department.
I think you mean 2007.
That’s been true in the past, but until Windows 10 is released for phones, you’re just speculating. What parts are going to be trimmed away in the new generations of hardware to be released will likely be different from device to device as it’s up to OEMs to package the software with the hardware.
Just because X feature(s) from desktops doesn’t exist in the generic phone version doesn’t make it “not Windows 10”. There are many features and APIs in Windows that are redundant, legacy, or not usable on phones & tablets to begin with and there’s no reason they can’t be cut away and still be “Windows 10”.
It’s also true the other way around. Traditional desktops have no need for on screen keyboards so why would you want it installed? Does that make it “not Windows 10” because the phone with Windows 10 does have it?
I see the same argument with Android v. [insert beloved distro here] where Android “isn’t linux” but [distro] is. It’s just as ridiculous an argument as saying Windows 10 phone ed. is not Windows 10 when they are using the same basic core system appropriate to the hardware platform.
Developers already knows that “write once, run anywhere” has plenty of asterisks attached to it.
To be fair, people who say “Android isn’t Linux” are typically trying to say “<Android ABI> != <Desktop Linux ABI>” without being knowledgable to prepend these lines:
let Linux = ABI:X11 | ABI:glibc | ABI:Linux
let Android = ABI:Android | ABI:Dalvik | ABI:Bionic | ABI:Linux
People generally talk about platforms in terms of what will run on them, not what goes into them.
Edited 2015-03-17 21:55 UTC
That was certainly true of Windows 8.1 vs Windows Phone 8.1; you have to link against different libraries for each and build separate packages with slightly different SDKs. That situation is very similar to the Mac OS X/iOS split where some libraries are common, others are completely different, and you build separate packages with separate SDKs.
More of the user space is supposed to be common in Windows 10, though just how much of the base distribution is common remains to be seen.
They seem to be promising a common SDK, library infrastructure, and even unified app packaging for Windows 10 tablet/laptop/desktop & phone apps, but the new SDKs haven’t been publicly released yet and details are sparse… but _supposedly_ the ‘Modern’ app story for Windows 10 looks more like the iOS split between iPhone and iPad — you build a single package with resources for both screen sizes, and select appropriate UI metaphors at runtime.
Note that the currently released builds for desktop and phone are very early and there’s still a mix of Windows 8.1-style and Windows 10-style apps on both.
One can certainly imagine Apple doing something similar between iOS and Mac OS X; they already have multi-arch fat binaries and the OSs are already sort-of compatible in that the iOS Simulator runs x86/x86_64 processes natively on the Mac. With more work on providing common libraries and better UI integration, UIKit-based apps that adapt at runtime to touch (iOS) or mouse/keyboard (Mac) interfaces would be totally possible. Supposedly they don’t want to, though.
IMHO, it has to go beyond just linking against different libraries.
Some/Many Applications will need a total rethink/redesign.
They can’t expect infinite space for their temp files. you know the ones that don’t get purged when the app shuts down. The files that eat up your disk space.
A different paradyme will have to be used by coders in order to make their products succeed.
{just take a peek at the hidden directories on a Windows System. Every user account has one. How many GB can you recover then?}
2007….I know it feels like almost 2 decades. ;-D
With the development of the WinRT framework what I would love to see Microsoft do is ring fence all legacy frameworks and put it as ‘Legacy Support’ in the ‘Program and Features’ so that it is possible to uninstall those legacy components some time in the future. That would save a decent amount of space and hopefully serve as a good incentive for Microsoft to move all of Windows UI to XAML and modern API’s.
Hopefully they are getting closer to this. There’s hope for a WinRT Explorer in Windows 10, which would be one of the last major components still using Win32.
The older portions of Win32 are the lowest API in Windows, handling the primitives (e.g. Device Independent Bitmaps) that everything builds upon, including WinRT & .NET. It’s been well tested and well used for 20 years, it’s what Windows engineers would have used as their go-to for writing WinRT — a higher-level API, but certainly not a replacement.
It would be right to say that Explorer is the last major component written for Win32.
It comes down to where you draw the lines of demarcation between Win32 and what is part of the ‘base of Windows’ because with Microsoft re-organising their code base what used to be considered as ‘win32’ might have been pushed further down the stack meaning they’re a primitive low level operating system level API that are needed as the basis of Windows Phone, Windows on the desktop and so on. I’m not surprised that they are re-using well tested code because it makes sense vs. simply re-creating something that does the same thing as the code which used to be used.
That would be nice; Windows UI all using XAML so it addresses the scalability in consistencies in the operating system – I am hoping that Windows 10 addresses some of those issues.
So, stacker and doublespace all over again. It seems they think we have fast enough cpus and drives that they need to slow us down with on-the-fly compression crap again.
I’m more fascinated with Microsoft’s new programming languages than the operating system.
It been old news. A 16gb tablet with a x86 atom that actually has all the functionality of a full pc. It has amazing battery life and even doubles as a external battery for cellphones. Thats the last time i buy a worthless android tablet. My kids have a lg gpad with 3d cameras and a samsung tab 3. Yet they tossed them aside to play roblox on our computers. Yes roblox is on android now. They basically have the recovery partition as a link and any changes are stored some where else. Its just like an android partition,but on windows I have root. I wont change the actual recovery img.Maybe android should give everyone root and use a versioning system to keep clean system. If i could load windows 8 on my g3 i would! I mean the g3 has 3gigs of ram, and 32 gigs of space. The tablet has 1gb and 16 gigs.
Edited 2015-03-17 15:55 UTC
So I was hoping that they were going to start rolling things from some of the lessons learned from their internal MinWin project that got the necessary disk space down to about 40MB – still huge compared to Linux, but impressive and equivalent of a Linux command-line only install.
Still, I’m sure they could have learned a lot from that so as to know when to pull out DLLs or install them. I’m sure they can save a lot more than the 1.5GB from compression if they refactored them to be layered better.