12 replies to this topic

[spudtrooper]

32GB Surface here. Did the Patch Tuesday Updates last night and went from 2.5gb free space (moved recovery partition to USB to get that!) and after updating I now have 9.9 GB of space left. My tablet is heavily used by 3 users with tons of apps/email/web surfing - did Microsoft consolidate the App storage space to share between users? fix some renegade caching that may have caused some apps to grow or fix something with un-installs to actually clean them up? Either way, i'm happy! Am I the only one that got not just some space back but GIGS of space back. I did double check that compression wasn't enabled either - curious if that helps/hurts performance on these things - anyone try that?

[neo158]

I noticed that as well. Nice to see that Microsoft are doing everything they can to fix the issues with Surface, I also noticed that the performance hit when Surface runs low on space is fixed as well. Some people are just impatient though and expect it to be perfect straight away.

[+Brandon Live]

Not Surface-specific, but some users were affected by a problem where cached app packages or updates were not cleaned up properly. One of the January updates fixes this problem and cleaned up anything erroneously left behind by the bug before.

[Orange Battery]

neo158, on 10 January 2013 - 19:08, said:

I noticed that as well. Nice to see that Microsoft are doing everything they can to fix the issues with Surface, I also noticed that the performance hit when Surface runs low on space is fixed as well. Some people are just impatient though and expect it to be perfect straight away.

In all fairness, its not like MS is new to the OS market. I would kind of expect it to be past the stage of taking up so much space, at least by the time they launch.

[neo158]

Orange Battery, on 10 January 2013 - 19:36, said:

In all fairness, its not like MS is new to the OS market. I would kind of expect it to be past the stage of taking up so much space, at least by the time they launch.

I'm not going to disagree with you but this is a bug that's been fixed by Microsoft relating to cached app packages and updates that weren't cleared up properly as Brandon mentions in the post above yours.

[Dashel]

Seems a bit of an understatement to call it a caching bug when it returned over half of our available space on the device.

[GP007]

So is this just surface specific or does it extend to Rt and 8 in general through some other non-firmware patch?

[+Brandon Live]

Dashel, on 16 January 2013 - 20:00, said:

Seems a bit of an understatement to call it a caching bug when it returned over half of our available space on the device.

I don't understand what you mean. The impact on a specific user doesn't change the nature of the bug. If you hit the bug and did a lot of app installs/updates, the cumulative size of those downloaded packages stuck in the cache can be quite large.

GP007, on 16 January 2013 - 20:21, said:

So is this just surface specific or does it extend to Rt and 8 in general through some other non-firmware patch?

This was already answered in this very thread. This was not a firmware change.

[HawkMan]

This thread made me realize something something else.

Isn't the Surface(or rather Windows8/RT tablets) the only one to natively offer proper multi user support.

[Dashel]

Brandon Live, on 16 January 2013 - 20:38, said:

I don't understand what you mean. The impact on a specific user doesn't change the nature of the bug. If you hit the bug and did a lot of app installs/updates, the cumulative size of those downloaded packages stuck in the cache can be quite large.

Except I don't know anyone that had ever installed anywhere near the size of the freed space. (ie I had about 2GB of apps installed and still got 8+GB back. On our other one that is shared by two people, it had maybe 500MB of apps per user and still saw the exact same 8GB+ returned space.) ie use of the device seems to have little to no bearing on the amount returned or we wouldn't have all seen roughly the same amount.

[+Brandon Live]

Dashel, on 16 January 2013 - 20:58, said:

Except I don't know anyone that had ever installed anywhere near the size of the freed space. (ie I had about 2GB of apps installed and still got 8+GB back. On our other one that is shared by two people, it had maybe 500MB of apps per user and still saw the exact same 8GB+ returned space.) ie use of the device seems to have little to no bearing on the amount returned or we wouldn't have all seen roughly the same amount.

How are you judging the size of installed apps? Are you counting updates? (including the inbox apps?) Oh, and their dependencies (i.e. VC++ libraries, etc).

The other thing to remember is that the system cleans up things like WU updates and rollback data on a regular basis (i.e. every 10 days). So it may have happened that you saw the effect of that at the same time.

[+SharpGreen]

HawkMan, on 16 January 2013 - 20:45, said:

This thread made me realize something something else.

Isn't the Surface(or rather Windows8/RT tablets) the only one to natively offer proper multi user support.

No. Android 4.2 added native multi-user support to tablet versions of the OS.

[HawkMan]

How many tablets have access to 4.2 yet ?