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| Windows RT+Office RT takes up 12GB disk space |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2012-10-19 20:07:59 |
| 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. |
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| RE[2]: It could have been better |
| By j-kidd on 2012-10-21 00:41:44 |
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> 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. |
 - Score: 3 |
| RE[2]: Not quite true |
| By UltraZelda64 on 2012-10-21 05:23:13 |
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> 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 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. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Comment by kurkosdr |
| By anevilyak on 2012-10-21 12:41:43 |
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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 |
| - Score: 2 |
| Most of it Legacy... |
| By dionicio on 2012-10-21 13:41:29 |
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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. |
| - Score: 0 |
| Don't get it |
| By quackalist on 2012-10-21 15:57:45 |
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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 |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[3]: Not quite true |
| By lucas_maximus on 2012-10-21 16:45:35 |
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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. |
| - Score: 2 |
| And yet there is QNX |
| By jefro on 2012-10-21 16:48:03 |
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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? |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE: Good reasons or bad excuses? |
| By lucas_maximus on 2012-10-21 16:51:02 |
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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). |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: And yet there is QNX |
| By lucas_maximus on 2012-10-21 16:53:16 |
| I honestly wonder whether trolling or stupid when I see these comments. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[4]: Not quite true |
| By quackalist on 2012-10-21 17:35:55 |
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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? |
| - Score: 1 |
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