How much storage does the Surface 2 have to actually work with?

[mobster011]

Out of the box, how much space does a 32GB Surface 2 have for you to work with?

Thanks!

 

[cygnus11]

Check out this link: Microsoft Surface storage | Surface disk space | How much disk space on Surface. I think this has the information you are looking for.

 

[mobster011]

Perfect. Thank you

 

[iampwd]

If you do a reset of the Surface RT running Windows 8.1 you will get 20GB+ free. I haven't done it yet with the Surface 2 but I think it will be the same. Right out of the box I think it was 18GB free just like the linked site says.

 

[mobster011]

Do you mean a factory reset? What exactly does it remove to gain some space back?

 

[iampwd]

Yes I guess you can call it factory reset (I think it's called Remove everything and reinstall Windows) under settings. I'm sorry but I don't know what it removes.

 

[Pete]

Just use Disk Cleanup and have a good root around. Easy way to release a good amount of storage space.

With the addition of a decent SD card and use of the cloud, storage isn't really an issue on the S2.

 

[livekyle]

I guess I'll just dig this up instead of making a new thread...

Is it normal that my internal storage keeps shrinking even though I haven't installed any apps whatsoever since the second day with my S2 (which was about a week ago)? In the beginning I had 18.1GB of free space. After all my apps had been installed there wasn't much of a Change (not much of an app guy, Surface has pretty much everything I need out of the box). But then it started going down to like 14.7-14.6GB. And now that I installed the Patch Tuesday updates, it's down to 14.0. It obviously has to do with the updates I guess. Does it "keep" all the updates it ever installed?!?! Please tell me it isn't like that. It would imply that sooner or later the storage would be full without installing any apps or putting any files on the device (again, none of which I did...).

Also, I'm not a complete retard when it comes to pc stuff. I tried Disc Cleanup (frees like 100MB so yea...) and rebooting (sometimes actually releases quite an amount of storage) but that doesn't seem to help.

Conclusion: I've had the device for about a week now and the initial 18GB have shrunk to 14GB with only a handful of small apps installed and no files whatsoever (Music, Photos, Videos etc.) stored on the device...

 

[v0lum3]

I guess I'll just dig this up instead of making a new thread...

Is it normal that my internal storage keeps shrinking even though I haven't installed any apps whatsoever since the second day with my S2 (which was about a week ago)? In the beginning I had 18.1GB of free space. After all my apps had been installed there wasn't much of a Change (not much of an app guy, Surface has pretty much everything I need out of the box). But then it started going down to like 14.7-14.6GB. And now that I installed the Patch Tuesday updates, it's down to 14.0. It obviously has to do with the updates I guess. Does it "keep" all the updates it ever installed?!?! Please tell me it isn't like that. It would imply that sooner or later the storage would be full without installing any apps or putting any files on the device (again, none of which I did...).

Also, I'm not a complete retard when it comes to pc stuff. I tried Disc Cleanup (frees like 100MB so yea...) and rebooting (sometimes actually releases quite an amount of storage) but that doesn't seem to help.

Conclusion: I've had the device for about a week now and the initial 18GB have shrunk to 14GB with only a handful of small apps installed and no files whatsoever (Music, Photos, Videos etc.) stored on the device...

There could be different reasons why... When you exit or suspend different apps, they get moved from the ram, to the pagefile on the disk, so if you have a lot of apps suspended (and mail, internet explorer and Facebook takes up a lot of ram), the amount of free diskspace will shrink! Furthermore both mail and Facebook have a lot of disk cache, especially if you set you mail app to download all mail.
It could also be the download folder in SoftwareDistribution in the windows folder, where both app updates and windows update is cached. Sometimes the diskcleaner doesn't clean that completely! Also some memory dumps from system failures sometimes also take up a lot of space, and can be removed with the diskcleaner utility, if you click the "clean up systemfiles"!

Hope it helps!