Surface RT storage -- unexplained loss

[mrpuny]

Not a great idea. Windows Update cleans this up every 30 days on its own. Cleaning up this cache preemtively both loses your logs and update installation history (no forensics for troubleshooting or seeing what you've installed when) - as well as clears out updates that have downloaded but not yet installed requiring your machine to re-download them again.

Unfortunately, this just shows that the Windows team hasn't come to terms with what it means to support mobile devices. Keeping ~5GB of files around for possible troubleshooting later on is fine on a desktop or traditional laptop with lots of storage, but for a device with only ~16GB of user-available storage to begin with, it's a questionable design decision at best.

I've experienced first hand being down to close to 1GB of space remaining on my surface after a few weeks use. That's with no media files on the main drive either; I've got those on a microsd after a bit of hacking to get libraries working with it. (Which is another issue Microsoft needs to straighten out.) After running disk cleanup (some big error reporting files in particular) and clearing out the softwaredistribution/download directory, I was back to nearly 10GB. That's crazy.

I've got no particular difficulty doing things like this, but the whole idea behind Windows 8/Windows RT is that it's supposed to be simpler and more "device-like" for this new era of computing. I don't think sucking up the users' disk space or making them manually clean up after the system is consistent with that goal. Not to mention that this just adds to the meme that Windows is "bloated". No normal person with a Windows table who finds their storage running low is going to say "gosh, I'm so glad MS is keeping all this stuff around for diagnostic purposes on the off chance something goes wrong." They're going to say "Windows is so bloated. Look how quickly a 32GB Surface fills up compared to a 16GB iPad (or Kindle Fire or Nexus tablet)."

Sean

 

[petersun21]

Unfortunately, this just shows that the Windows team hasn't come to terms with what it means to support mobile devices. Keeping ~5GB of files around for possible troubleshooting later on is fine on a desktop or traditional laptop with lots of storage, but for a device with only ~16GB of user-available storage to begin with, it's a questionable design decision at best.

I've experienced first hand being down to close to 1GB of space remaining on my surface after a few weeks use. That's with no media files on the main drive either; I've got those on a microsd after a bit of hacking to get libraries working with it. (Which is another issue Microsoft needs to straighten out.) After running disk cleanup (some big error reporting files in particular) and clearing out the softwaredistribution/download directory, I was back to nearly 10GB. That's crazy.

I've got no particular difficulty doing things like this, but the whole idea behind Windows 8/Windows RT is that it's supposed to be simpler and more "device-like" for this new era of computing. I don't think sucking up the users' disk space or making them manually clean up after the system is consistent with that goal. Not to mention that this just adds to the meme that Windows is "bloated". No normal person with a Windows table who finds their storage running low is going to say "gosh, I'm so glad MS is keeping all this stuff around for diagnostic purposes on the off chance something goes wrong." They're going to say "Windows is so bloated. Look how quickly a 32GB Surface fills up compared to a 16GB iPad (or Kindle Fire or Nexus tablet)."

Sean

Well stated.

 

[Julian Chin Chee Jong]

Did a refresh...and received about 6 gigs of space (wth?!). However, some of my non-xbox-live games data is gone and I have to replay all over again. This is messed up.