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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[4]: Not quite true |
| By UltraZelda64 on 2012-10-21 17:37:19 |
|
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. |
 - Score: 1 |
| RE: Comment by kurkosdr |
| By Yoko_T on 2012-10-21 19:19:57 |
|
> 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. 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. |
| - Score: -1 |
| RE: Will it handle cruft? No. |
| By shinkou on 2012-10-22 01:26:23 |
| 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. |
| - Score: 1 |
| RE[4]: Not quite true |
| By tylerdurden on 2012-10-22 01:58:19 |
|
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 |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: Not quite true |
| By HappyGod on 2012-10-22 03:10:55 |
|
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 |
| - Score: 2 |
| Comment by MollyC |
| By MollyC on 2012-10-22 03:15:54 |
|
"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. |
| - Score: 3 |
| RE: It could have been better |
| By MollyC on 2012-10-22 03:22:55 |
| 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. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: Don't get it |
| By MollyC on 2012-10-22 03:26:24 |
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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. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE: It could have been better |
| By bnolsen on 2012-10-22 08:00:14 |
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> Of course 12GB is too much, but it's actually better than other choice: not having a Windows ARM version at all. You lost me here. I guess competition is good as long as they are playing fair (they have a poor history). |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[5]: Not quite true |
| By henderson101 on 2012-10-22 12:05:01 |
|
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.) |
| - Score: 2 |
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