[Someone1234]

I'm always impressed by people's creative ability to put a negative spin on almost anything. Particularly to generate hate-clicks.

In this case they're implementing Seamless Updates, which should substantially reduce downtime and improve roll-backs during update installation (a major complaint) but instead of focusing on the benefit, they focus on the disk space loss.

The reason it takes up space on Windows, Android, and Chrome OS is that the reserved area holds a chunk of the operating system which is updated in the background before restart. When a restart occurs, the reserved and active slices are swapped (and reversion can be rapidly conducted for failures/roll-backs).

This is a nice quality of life improvement for a common complaint.

[smacktoward]

I can go to microsoft.com right now and buy -- not from some third party OEM, mind you, but designed and sold by Microsoft themselves -- a Surface device with a grand total of 64GB of storage. In the context of that device, giving up 7GB means losing more than 10% of the advertised storage space. Which is kind of a lot.

[vxNsr]

To add to this: the OS already takes up 10-20gb so now it can take close 30gb or nearly half of your hard drive, before you even open the box.

[coderobe]

it's a nice quality of life improvement unless you're running low on space. 7+ gb is a lot, especially on embedded devices with low soldered storage - like microsoft's own products! coincidentally instead of offering upgradeable internal storage they upsell really hard on the models with more storage in their surface lineup

if anything, this should be a toggle- if only an opt-out toggle.

fwiw, you can install a linux system including an entire graphical stack with web browser and mail client in that space, twice.

[Wowfunhappy]

This is also going to be a major pain on my Windows VM's. I often only give those ~32 GB of storage to begin with, since they're only for a tiny handful of programs.

I'm assuming there will be a group policy setting I can change, though, since I'm lucky enough to have Windows 10 Pro...

[6c696e7578]

> fwiw, you can install a linux system including an entire graphical stack with web browser and mail client in that space, twice.

I think you could fit quite a few raspberry pi's with GUI environments into 7g.

The OEM and MS alliance has been going for some time now. MS promises HW push, and the OEM promise to sell hardware only with Windows. I am surprised they didn't round it up to 10G.

> if anything, this should be a toggle- if only an opt-out toggle.

I agree, but that doesn't help sell PC's.

ZFS snapshots would reduce the space requirements.

[twblalock]

I'd rather have them display an error message the next time I log in if I didn't have enough space. Otherwise I'm giving up a chunk of disk space that will be unused 99% of the time.

Considering that the Surface tablets don't have that much space to begin with, that's a bit of a sacrifice. I also wonder how they will handle this in Azure VMs running Windows, VMs running on developer laptops, etc.

[dvfjsdhgfv]

Had they approached the update issue with more care, people would have been more lenient.