Why is Windows RT so BIG?

[Dominato3r]

OK, I now know for certain that Windows RT uses DirectX, which distinguishes itself from other platforms. So that is one answer I've got (on my own). I don't know how much impact it has on storage compared to other platforms, though. But I suppose that's one contributing factor.

Frankly it's hard to think that driver packages taking up so much space on Windows RT. First of all, Surface has limited connectivity in the forms of USB and TCP/IP. In other words, you are not going to install video cards or RAID controllers there. So basically it leaves you with USB and USB peripherals. I don't know if it's true that if I connect my USB devices to Surface they will be supported (without Windows Updates) natively. Even if that's the case,

1) That can't possibly what makes Windows RT the size of Windows 7/8. Again, we're talking about USB devices, not PCI/PCIe devices.
2) That seems quite counter-productive to have Windows RT in the first place.

What else is contributing to the size of Windows RT?

I think the best way to think of RT is Windows without legacy application support.

The OS, Office (essentially the full version) and "apps" take up 8GB of space. I don 't think it's drivers that are making up the bulk of it. And I don't think MS is going to shed any light either.

 

[lopri]

But if that's the case, why is it so big? Because if you look at iOS and Android, Windows RT doesn't really do all that much to warrant x3~x5 bigger installation. (thus my "competence" comment in the original post) If legacy support has been stripped, shouldn't Windows itself have gone through a dramatic diet? (think of the opposite process of Windows XP -> Vista transition)

I understood that MS wanted to shed as much as bloat in the forms of legacy support with Windows RT. And the implicit understanding in the community was that MS needed that break in order to be competitive in the mobile space. Something just doesn't add up. How much space do the native RT apps occupy?

 

[lopri]

Ah. I think I might have misunderstood your point. Are you saying that MS might not have built Windows RT from ground-up, but started from its desktop version (Windows 7/8) and simply made some code changes for ARM architecture from the existing Windows? Hmm.. I think that's within the realm of possibility.

So the "need to break from legacy code" is rather a convenient excuse to drop the support as MS make the transition to RT, yet Windows RT isn't THAT much different from its desktop version, other than the conversion to ARM? That'd explain the size of installation (which would certainly be worthy of "bloat" title), for sure. (except that you and I could be flamed to death in this thread)

@IamDavid: ATIV Smart PC is NOT Windows RT. It's a full-blown desktop Windows 8 running on Atom.

 

[lopri]

Please people, I posed my question about Windows RT.

1) Windows RT is Windows running on ARM, not Windows running on Atom. Atom runs desktop Windows, not RT.
2) I am not quarreling about the discrepancy between advertised specs v. actual specs. (although that's something we can discuss elsewhere) My question is limited to Windows RT itself and its installation package which takes up as much room as desktop version of Windows.

 

[Subyman]

I've read that the current version of Windows RT uses Windows 8's desktop stack for the Office suite due to Office not being completely ready for RT. This may be some of the reason for the bloat. However, 8GB for an OS, Office, and all the pack-in apps is not crazy big. For ARM it is, but you must remember that Windows RT is much more robust than Android or iOS. It includes generic printing support, USB devices, and full fledged OS features.

The 5GB for recovery is a bit much too. Apple uses iCloud and wireless synced backups for recovery, but RT places the backups directly on the device. I've read that people have successfully backed up to SD cards and have merged the recovery partition with the standard partition to recoup space.

I'm sure going forward these issues will be fixed either by larger driver options or a smaller install. At least Surface has an expansion slot for extra memory, unlike the iPad or Nexus.

 

[lamedude]

x86 has a higher code density than ARM, and MS's x86 compiler is probably better than their ARM compiler which probably hasn't received much attention after WinMo flopped until recently. I wouldn't be surprised if that took up much of the space saved from not including legacy components.

 

[Nothinman]

Ease of use. I was astonished at the ease interfacing with printers, networked computers and all other normal electronics a computer could connect to back in the pc days... show me a simple way to play a movie off a networked pc on a ios or android. With the win8 ones my kids can do it almost out of the box.. just gotta add homegroup password.
Don't get me wrong, ios and android are great but the haven't been friendly with the things we all used to know. No MS has shown them how it should be done.

And all of that works out of the box in WinRT? We're not talking about x86 Win8.

In this thread, we have a poster who somehow thinks that despite every computer ever sold needing space allocated to an OS, this new tablet somehow should be marketed as the free space after OS overhead.

The devices come with exactly as much storage as they are marketed as having. You are buying hardware, not free space. This is nothing new. I'm getting the impression you're just looking to stir crap up.

But when someone buys an iPod with 32G of space they expect to be able to use almost all of that. Same for Android phones. No one's complained because of the size of the OS being so relatively small. Losing 1-2G as "overhead" for the OS and bundled apps is one thing but losing 50% is completely different.

Marketing the device as a 32G model with roughly 16G usable and a microSD slot that can't be used by Metro apps is disingenuous at best and I would call it deceptive.

 

[IamDavid]

And all of that works out of the box in WinRT? We're not talking about x86 Win8.
.

Yes. Like I said earlier, I haven't found anything it won't do yet besides legacy software support.. I'm very surprised it worked like this. I actually don't understand the need now for 3 separate versions, 4 if you count WP8.

Lori, I know my ATIV isn't the RT version. I was letting people know I have both so I'm able to do a side by side comparison.

 

[Nothinman]

Yes. Like I said earlier, I haven't found anything it won't do yet besides legacy software support.. I'm very surprised it worked like this. I actually don't understand the need now for 3 separate versions, 4 if you count WP8.

Lori, I know my ATIV isn't the RT version. I was letting people know I have both so I'm able to do a side by side comparison.

I'm surprised about the printers, but the rest is normal Windows stuff which I'm just more surprised they didn't restrict in order to push you toward Live services. But have you tried installing drivers for a printer that doesn't automatically work?

But I still don't think all of that justifies wasting half of the space in the device. Storage manufacturers get away with it because the difference between the SI and binary numbers aren't all that drastic. If I buy a 32G drive and I get roughly 30G of usable space on it without an understanding of why, I may ask some people about it but will likely move on and live with it. But if I lost a whole 50% or more, I would be pissed. And even more-so once I found out that I would have a good 15G or more available space if I had bought an Android or iOS tablet.

Go ahead and read the Shrinkage section here too.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012...t-better-and-a-bit-worse-than-microsoft-says/

 

[IamDavid]

We have 6 or 7 different networked pcs in our buildings and I have my normal one t home and every one works automatically. The work printers range from newer laser printers too an old school brothers printer.

I think on paper it looks crazy for them to advertise the way they do but in practice I don't think limited HD space matters much. Skydrive, SD slot, simple networked drives all negate the need for most people to have terabytes of storage space.

 

[Nothinman]

We have 6 or 7 different networked pcs in our buildings and I have my normal one t home and every one works automatically. The work printers range from newer laser printers too an old school brothers printer.

I think on paper it looks crazy for them to advertise the way they do but in practice I don't think limited HD space matters much. Skydrive, SD slot, simple networked drives all negate the need for most people to have terabytes of storage space.

Networked drives only work on a local network and the microSD card can't easily be used by Metro Apps. Did you read the section of article describing how MS wastes space in other ways as well? 500M Office patch that Windows keeps around after installation for at least a week, at least 3 revisions of Metro Apps are retained indefinitely and I don't think a supported way of clearing those out exists yet. This isn't just a problem on paper.

Hell, they can't even release a 16G version because the size of their system would leave almost nothing for the user.

 

[WelshBloke]

In this thread, we have a poster who somehow thinks that despite every computer ever sold needing space allocated to an OS, this new tablet somehow should be marketed as the free space after OS overhead.

The devices come with exactly as much storage as they are marketed as having. You are buying hardware, not free space. This is nothing new. I'm getting the impression you're just looking to stir crap up.

Storage suggests you could, you know, store something on it.

You are very much buying free space unless Microsoft have suddenly decided to give out 64gd versions for the same price as 32gd ones.

Now you are right that everyone else does it but you don't see a difference in scale in this case?

Personally I think if you are advertising storage space you should have to advertise the free space, and that goes for android and ios as well. If I bought a 500gd hard drive and it only came with 250gb of usable space and 250gb of firmware to make it work I'd be pissed (and astonished).

 

[KentState]

Does RT use a page file?

 

[Nothinman]

Does RT use a page file?

From the Ars article I linked earlier:

On a freshly reset Surface, the operating system, page file (two of them, in fact; pagefile.sys and swapfile.sys), and Office RT Preview total 7.86GB. You can't really do much about this. Even if you don't want Office, there's no easy way to remove it, as it doesn't appear in Add/Remove Programs.

 

[KentState]

Then that is one huge difference. I don't believe that iOS or Android use a separate page file on the media.

 

[hhhd1]

If the WindowsRT+office and their updates use the same space as a regular x86 windows, then a 32gb storage is really a bad idea.

The remaining user space is going to be less than 8~16gb, which is barely enough to have couple of small apps and few little media files.

 

[Nothinman]

Then that is one huge difference. I don't believe that iOS or Android use a separate page file on the media.

I just checked my GNex and no, no swap mounted. I also just checked my Win8 VM and it also has both a pagefile.sys and swapfile.sys, pagefile.sys is 3.5G and swapfile.sys is 256M while the VM has 4G allocated to it. Surface has 2G of memory in it seems reasonable to guess that it loses roughly 2G to that as well.

But that doesn't matter. MS knows the requirements of the OS they just built, so they should have included extra storage to make up for the fact that their "portable" OS is like 7x the size of their competitors.

 

[KentState]

I just checked my GNex and no, no swap mounted. I also just checked my Win8 VM and it also has both a pagefile.sys and swapfile.sys, pagefile.sys is 3.5G and swapfile.sys is 256M while the VM has 4G allocated to it. Surface has 2G of memory in it seems reasonable to guess that it loses roughly 2G to that as well.

But that doesn't matter. MS knows the requirements of the OS they just built, so they should have included extra storage to make up for the fact that their "portable" OS is like 7x the size of their competitors.

This IMO is one reason why Win8 is too much of a compromise across the board. They tried to make a one size fits all OS which is still to bloated for tablets and missing features people want for their desktop.

To the OP, there is just a lot to RT that isn't part of iOS or Android at this point. Large binaries, drivers, DLLs, page files, restore image and so on. To answer your question, compare the features of RT to Win Mobile8/Android/iOS and you will see a large difference. Sophisticated network layer, full multi-tasking, windowing, many utilities, scheduling system, tasks, .Net Framework, LDAP integration, remote desktop, file indexing, multiple accounts, file system security, and a ton of other stuff that you don't think about on a tablet.

 

[lopri]

I have found another explanation in line of Dominato3r's comment.

Microsoft's past smartphone operating systems (Pocket PC, Windows Mobile, and even KIN) have all used Windows CE. Windows CE these days is more or less OK as an operating system, with all the features you'd expect, but it wasn't always this way. Older versions had lots of weird behaviors to accommodate the weak hardware they ran on. For example, in Windows Mobile 6, each application only had 32MB of private memory, and you were limited to a total of 32 processes at any one time. The version of Windows CE that Windows Phone 7 used was some sort of hybrid between Windows CE 6 and 7.

The biggest missing feature in Windows Phone 7's kernel is (arguably) its lack of support for multiple cores. Although full Windows CE 7 does support multiple cores (at least two), the version in Windows Phone 7 apparently does not. This left it limited to what are nowadays pretty old single-core Snapdragon processors, which are grossly uncompetitive with the processors used by competing platforms.

In 2010, when Windows Phone 7 came out, Microsoft had no real option here; Windows CE was its only kernel that ran on ARM. That's no longer the case today. Windows NT is now available on ARM, courtesy of the work done to produce Windows RT. In Windows Phone 8, Microsoft had a choice, and it has chosen to use the Windows NT kernel for its phone operating system

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012...ew-microsoft-lays-a-foundation-for-success/4/

 

[lopri]

@Kenstate: Your answer is the most comprehensive one so far. Earlier discussion wrt pagefile.sys by Nothingman also made me think of possibility which indexing service takes up more space.

P.S. What is "windowing"?

 

[KentState]

@Kenstate: Your answer is the most comprehensive one so far. Earlier discussion wrt pagefile.sys by Nothingman also made me think of possibility which indexing service takes up more space.

P.S. What is "windowing"?

Having more than one window active at a time. Android is just starting to do this (split screen) on some devices, but it is rather limited.

 

[lopri]

I see. There is no native support of multiple windows on Nexus 7 yet afaik. So that's one feature that RT can boast for the moment. But there are some apps that run on "floating windows" on Nexus 7 (Android 4.2), which enables multiple apps on a screen.

 

[Spicedaddy]

I've read that the current version of Windows RT uses Windows 8's desktop stack for the Office suite due to Office not being completely ready for RT. This may be some of the reason for the bloat. However, 8GB for an OS, Office, and all the pack-in apps is not crazy big. For ARM it is, but you must remember that Windows RT is much more robust than Android or iOS. It includes generic printing support, USB devices, and full fledged OS features.

The 5GB for recovery is a bit much too. Apple uses iCloud and wireless synced backups for recovery, but RT places the backups directly on the device. I've read that people have successfully backed up to SD cards and have merged the recovery partition with the standard partition to recoup space.

I'm sure going forward these issues will be fixed either by larger driver options or a smaller install. At least Surface has an expansion slot for extra memory, unlike the iPad or Nexus.

Well said, 8GB for OS is a little big, but when you consider it has drivers for a bunch of stuff, networking, a full version of office, it's not so bad.

The 5GB lost for recovery isn't a very intelligent move though. Throw in a USB drive with the recovery files on it, and backup online for files/settings. It would look much better to have 20+ GB free on the 32GB Surface.

 

[Hugo Drax]

Microsoft just shoehorned a bloated desktop os and decades of cruft onto arm. Even office on rt switches into desktop mode with desktop windows and menus. What do you expect. Winrt API still rides on top of win32 API.

 

[lopri]

So if we look at the current line-ups;

Apple
Desktop: OS X
Tablet: iOS
Phone: iOS

Microsoft
Desktop: Windows 8
Tablet: Windows 8, Windows RT (x86 version converted/trimmed to run on ARM)
Phone: Windows 8X

Google
Desktop: Chrome OS (browser-based OS running on both ARM/x86)
Tablet: Android
Phone: Android

So the picture is clearer. iOS was a completely separate development from OS X from the get go, and while its interoperability is great with OS X but terrible with everything else. Android was developed to fight against iOS in mobile sphere, and for the most part there is no difference between phone version and tablet version.

Compared to them, Windows RT is a totally different beast in that its root is x86 Windows which goes all the way back to Windows NT, which in theory explains the need for a larger installation size. (But even then, wasn't it Windows Vista that startled people with its huge size? Windows XP/Server 2000 are much more frugal in their use of storage, despite being x86.)

Frankly this begs even more questions, which I will try to spell out later on. But I now understand why the dude who developed Surface/Windows 8 "resigned." :biggrin: