Microsoft released the Anniversary Update to Windows 10, but increased the free space requirement needed to install the update to exceed what’s possible on devices with only 32GB
I often wonder whether we have completely lost any notion of how big storage devices have become or how much data is required to do something, because 32GB is still extremely huge to me. Thirty-two billion bytes. It perplexes me what Windows would need that much space for, and whether most of it is actually really necessary. I suppose it could be a case of "little things add up".
One correction to the original article: Windows 10 will happily install to the Stream 7 and run just fine, if you use a USB drive and the aforementioned USB OTG -> USB hub -> keyboard/mouse/USB drive method. This is after accepting the Windows 8.1 > 10 upgrade on the device. I know because I did it; while Windows 10 does run a tad slower than 8.1 did, it's usable and space is not an issue using this installation method.
That said, I'd love to see further OpenBSD development on it, and now I'm kicking myself for giving away my tablet. Oh well, they're super cheap on eBay right now, averaging $35, so it's a possible future project.
> ...because 32GB is still extremely huge to me. Thirty-two billion bytes
Not to mention the device has a microSD slot, and I've tested it with up to a 64GB card. If Android is ever successfully ported to the device (100% driver support) we could see Marshmallow's seamless storage effectively make it a 96GB device.
With Microsoft upping the free space requirements, are 32GB devices going to be abandoned? Upgrading a Stream 7 from Windows 8 to 10 will result in a shorter support lifecycle for people not willing to start from scratch installing the Anniversary update from USB. Windows 8.1 is supported until 2023. Windows 10? 2025.
• Updates are cumulative, with each update built upon all of the updates that preceded it. A device needs to install the latest update to remain supported.
One is better off to not have upgraded to Win10 on the Stream.
When these were being dumped onto the market for $80 they came with free Office 365 Personal that I used on another machine. They also came with $25 credit on the Microsoft store. Sort of a no-brainer. If you run Chrome for any video they are able to play Youtube or Safari videos. It's a gym tablet, i.e. you won't really care if you accidentally crush it with an ellitical beam. The other use for the Stream is as a Chrome Remote Desktop for a real device.
You have 32-bit compatibility layers going back to Windows 95, including whatever is needed to render a GUI from that era. And you have 64-bit, possibly going as far back as Windows XP.
Are you sure? IIRC, from Windows 7 onwards XP compatibility was handled with a VM, and I'm fairly confident there's little in the way of Win95 support in Windows 10 (bear in mind Windows 10 is a continuation of the Windows NT line of operating systems, the Win9x operating systems were not in this lineage).
> IIRC, from Windows 7 onwards XP compatibility was handled with a VM
You have a funny definition of "is handled with". Your link describes manually installing additional, optional software to get a VM, not a feature of the Windows OS. I don't think very many people have done this and plenty of XP-era software "just works" without it.
XP mode exists in Windows 7 and beyond because Microsoft doesn't promise full compatibility with Windows XP. If some XP software "just works" it's no guarantee that it will continue to work as Windows changes. Furthermore, regarding "optional software to get a VM, not a feature of the Windows OS", XP Mode is a feature of the OS in the sense that the seamless integration with the apps running in the VM was designed by Microsoft for the purpose of supporting older software.
Out of interest, which XP-era software just works without it? I'm not talking about software that has been compiled for later Windows versions, I'm talking about software that hasn't been updated since XP.
> "Simply, it does not. Do a clean install. It's not there. That is why you have to go to that web page and click that big "download" button."
The assertion made was that Windows 10 contains multiple versions of Windows under the hood. If XP was one of these OS then there would be no need for that 'big download button', yet it exists. Why do you think that is?
> "PS: I was on the windows team during development of 7."
Good, then you can clear up what incompatibilities Windows 7 has with older Windows versions. For example, what level of support is there for Windows 95 software?
I didn't work on app compat, but there are a number of things that come to mind.
The first line of defense is that over the years and on average Win32 and COM were not built stupidly, but with an eye towards compatibility. It's a stable API. The fact that over history there have been 3 independent kernels (9x, NT, CE) that speak it and you could reasonably have a single code base running on all 3 does some good in this area. (And 9x/NT were largely binary compatible.) And hence there are simple things like: don't change function signatures release to release, don't change COM vtables without introducing a new interface leaving the old one in place, introduce size and version fields in structures so that future versions can add to them without breaking old callers, etc.
But there are also mitigations for incorrect or impolite misuse of Win32 that might be common in old software.
Example: If a 32-bit application writes to C:\Windows or some such like programs used to (and a current OS would have locked down by permissions), Vista and higher will redirect to AppData\Local\VirtualStore in the user's home directory. [1]
Example: Certain features like DEP and ASLR are opt-in at the binary level. An old binary will get an executable stack and no ASLR by default because old code might rely on these.
Example: There is actually a framework of app compat shims for common historical misuse of Win32 API. [2] When I worked at MS some time ago I used to read these in the source tree when I was bored or for simple amusement/curiosity. One of them for a particular 9x game always stuck in my mind, it had to do with API misuse and differences between 9x kernel32.dll (typically traps into the kernel right away) and NT kernel32.dll (which usually calls into ntdll after doing some user mode conversion), but maybe I won't go into more detail than that here ...
So my point is... You've got a stable API in Win32, you've got fairly conservative introduction of features that tend to break things, you've even got a way to selectively change how APIs behave for popular old apps. These things work pretty well by and large. Why waste a bunch of time and disk space with VMs?
On your side of the fence there is a VM host built into the Windows kernel (Hyper-V) and I think RDP can make remote apps (where "remote" could mean inside a VM guest) look pretty good. That is probably what is happening in "XP Mode". I don't think it'll necessarily do a better job than just Windows being Windows, which IMO does pretty well for most old software.
Citations using publicly available sources:
[1] Wikipedia article for UAC - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control : For example, if an application attempts to write to a directory such as "C:\Program Files\appname\settings.ini" to which the user does not have write permission, the write will be redirected to "C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\appname\settings.ini".
I appreciate the point, but not everyone loads their tablets with video media, much less HD movies. We have 4 tablets (and a few phones) in my family, across a wide range of android-type devices (i.e. including some Kindle Fires), and while the kids do fill them up with games rather quick, none of us put movies on them. We stream everything we want to watch because it's more convenient. 32GB still seems rather large to me, given how we use our devices.
I could upgrade to Anniversary with 32GB even with Office installed and without moving system files to the sd card. To get the required 16GB free I have moved all non-system files like downloads and music to the sd card, enabled disk-wide compression, removed all temporary files and disabled hibernation and swap (enabled them after).
I often wonder whether we have completely lost any notion of how big storage devices have become or how much data is required to do something, because 32GB is still extremely huge to me. Thirty-two billion bytes. It perplexes me what Windows would need that much space for, and whether most of it is actually really necessary. I suppose it could be a case of "little things add up".
The OpenBSD installer is under 300MB, although it doesn't include all that much: https://www.openbsd.org/ftp.html