5 ms·

Who buys a laptop with only 30 GB of storage? I didn’t even know that was possible these days. You should honestly tell your client to return it and buy somethi

by dpark 9y ago

Who buys a laptop with only 30 GB of storage? I didn’t even know that was possible these days. You should honestly tell your client to return it and buy something else. For reference, absolute minimum requirements are 16 GB for 32 bit and 20 GB for 64 bit [1]. So in theory your client’s laptop should work, but it’d probably be a poor experience. (Likely also a bad experience with modern Linux on 30 GB.) Given that your client’s Windows 10 laptop has an “old OS” on it, I think there’s some info missing in this story. A fresh laptop shouldn’t have an old OS install on it. (Or maybe this is OEM recovery gunk?) I just checked my laptop and the Windows folder is 18.7 GB. Did your client's laptop have a Windows.old folder taking a bunch of space? Large updates to Windows will create these. You can whack this if you need. [2] (Should also get deleted automatically after 10 days automatically.) Disclosure: Microsoft employee [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-specifications https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-10-specifica... [2] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4028075/windows-delete-your-previous-version-of-windows https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4028075/windows-del...

kashprime 9y ago
I fought this battle with a 64GB SSD, and gave up and cloned the drive onto a hybrid SSD/7200RPM drive (using EaseUS). I can't imagine what you went through to get it to fit on 30GB!
cesarb 9y ago
> (Likely also a bad experience with modern Linux on 30gb.) I just did an install of modern Linux (the latest CentOS 7, with Gnome deskop), so I can check. The root partition is using at the moment 4.2G, plus a 2.0G swap partition and a 1.0G boot partition. So if this were a 30G disk, I'd have more than 20G left, even after installing a few applications.
- dpark 9y ago
  That’s a fair bit smaller than I’d expect honestly. I’m surprised it’s not using more than that with the basic apps installed.
  - CydeWeys 9y ago
    There's plenty of serious Linux distros that still ship on a single CD. Arch Linux, for example, comes on a 522 MB ISO. That gets you a basic functional desktop environment, and anything else you might need can be installed from the Net.
    - dpark 9y ago
      Interestingly, Ubuntu requires 25 GB. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequire... So consumer-oriented distros don't seem to be nearly so much lighter than Windows. With the caveat that Ubuntu probably comes preloaded with more apps like Libre Office.
      - CydeWeys 9y ago
        A decent amount of that space ends up being on-disk swap for the RAM, for what it's worth. And note that, on that same page, Xubuntu and Lubuntu are offered up as alternatives for less performant computers. They only require 5 GB of space. Windows doesn't have a light version like that.
      - pletnes 9y ago
        That still leaves plenty of space for additional apps and data. Also you can uninstall e.g. Libreoffice post-install to slim it down.
      - vetinari 9y ago
        That's probably just a CYA requirement. I have 17.10 in a VM and it takes 8,7 GB on the disk, with a few extra apps compared to default install.
      - Izkata 9y ago
        That's probably more generous than necessary. I just installed Ubuntu 16.04 a month ago (new laptop), and with /home/ on its own partition, after installing everything I use regularly, root is only using 9.3G
    - 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
jenscow 9y ago
> Who buys a laptop with only 30 GB of storage? Somebody who doesn't work in the IT industry - the target demographic of Windows. I'm also surprised it's possible - but if it cuts the price, then why not? I assume 10GB more than the minimum is enough to earn the Windows badge. But I don't think the crux of the issue was lack of disk space.
- user5994461 9y ago
  For reference, a 32GB SD card is $10 and a TB disk is $40.
  - estebank 9y ago
    When the entire laptop is $300, the difference between those two is 10% of the consumer facing cost. And somebody buying a $300 computer clearly doesn't think (or doesn't know) they need 1 TB of storage.
    - user5994461 9y ago
      I gave example on a 1 TB because that's what I could find. Maybe the manufacturers could have 128GB disks for as little costs as the memory card.
Decade 9y ago
> Who buys a laptop with only 30 GB of storage? I didn’t even know that was possible these days. Ultra-cheap computers with MMC flash drives with pathetic read-write speeds. And pathetic other parts. Such as this charmer from Walmart. https://www.walmart.com/ip/Teqnio-ELL1103T-11-6-Laptop-Touchscreen-2-in-1-Windows-10-Home-Intel-Cherrytrail-Z8350-Processor-2GB-RAM-32GB-Flash-Drive/55474684 https://www.walmart.com/ip/Teqnio-ELL1103T-11-6-Laptop-Touch...
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  I don't understand the thought process behind cheaping out as much as possible on a terrible PC, then paying for many hours of work from a tech to try to get a pathetic machine to be usable. The correct course of action is to return the faulty machine and buy a better one, rather than throwing away the money on a tech who can really only do so much with such inferior hardware. It also boggles my mind how, still to this day, it's so hard to get a lower cost desktop or laptop that ships with an SSD, despite the fact that SSDs offer up such a performance improvement that many people consider them mandatory. The average consumer will have a much better experience with a computer that ships with a 128 GB SSD than a 1 TB HDD, yet every manufacturer is offering plenty of the latter (at 5400 rpm no less) and none of the former at sane price points. The two components even have similar costs now. In this era of streaming everything, the average person really isn't using much hard drive space. I know that my non-technical family members certainly aren't. I just got my mom a $450 refurbished 2012 Dell workstation for common desktop use (mostly email and word processing). She loves it. It's night-and-day faster than the machine it replaced. And the single biggest performance improvement in it comes from, you guessed it, the SSD. A $450 five-year-old used workstation is trouncing any modern desktop in the sub-$1,000 range in practical performance. I would've gotten her a new one, but couldn't find anything in the price range that has an SSD, and the kinds of computers that do ship with SSDs also tend to have unnecessarily upgraded (and costly) processors and graphics cards, which are only useful for gaming. (Oh, and the used workstation has a Core i7 in it too, so it's not exactly a slouch along any dimension except for 3D graphics performance.)
  - user5994461 9y ago
DanBC 9y ago
16GB https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1K665X7312 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1K665X7... https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6R46267218 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6R46267... AS you're an MS employee you'll know about WIMBoot and whatever the newer less stupid version of WIMBoot is.
- dpark 9y ago
  Those are ChromeBooks, not Windows laptops. Also, I'd never heard of WIMBoot. Being a Microsoft employee doesn't make me a Windows expert. I don't work on Windows and don't own any systems that WIMBoot targets. Looking at WIMBoot, it doesn't seem relevant for the case discussed here, either, since this client clearly didn't have the small space usage WIMBoot enables.
  - DanBC 9y ago
    https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAAG56KU1351&cm_re=windows_laptop-_-9SIAAG56KU1351-_-Product https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAAG56KU1... https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAF136G48784&cm_re=windows_laptop-_-9SIAF136G48784-_-Product https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAF136G48... https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAC4Z6CZ4439&cm_re=windows_laptop-_-1TS-000D-02370-_-Product https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAC4Z6CZ4... https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA24G6DV4649&cm_re=windows_laptop-_-9SIA24G6DV4649-_-Product https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA24G6DV4... https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6R46JS9643&cm_re=windows_laptop-_-1TS-000X-00N58-_-Product https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6R46JS9... etc etc. There are very many machines sold now, today, with Windows 10 (and previously Windows 8) that have only 32 GB drive space. With WIMBoot any updates would eat drive space and that space was not recoverable, and this would sometimes prevent updating to Windows 10. MS says this here: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2015/03/16/how-windows-10-achieves-its-compact-footprint/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2015/03/16/how-w... > The reason Windows 8.1 devices using WIMBOOT are not yet able to upgrade to Windows 10 is because many of the WIMBOOT devices have very limited system storage. That presents a challenge when we need to have the Windows 8.1 OS, the downloaded install image, and the Windows 10 OS available during the upgrade process. We do this because we need to be able to restore the machine back to Windows 8.1 if anything unexpected happens during the upgrade, such as power loss. In sum, WIMBOOT devices present a capacity challenge to the upgrade process and we are evaluating a couple of options for a safe and reliable upgrade path for those devices. There's a complex workaround of "delete everything, and use two USB sticks" which isn't great for the target user. The new file compression stuff is much much better than WIMBoot.
jancsika 9y ago
> (Likely also a bad experience with modern Linux on 30 GB.) Literally just typed "raspbian minimum card size" in Google and Google dug up this as the top result: "/Pi Hardware /SD Cards. The minimum size SD card you can use for Rasbian is 2GB, but it is recommended to get a 4GB SD card or above. Card Speed. A Class 4 card, which is the minimum recommended has an average read/write speed of 4 MB/sec." The default packages include things like webkit and libre office, so it looks to be a fully functional Linux install on a popular piece of hardware. Now, 4GB still seems dangerously small. But if all a client wanted was office plus web, I bet someone like OP could make a workable system within that size limit without Raspbian filling the emptied space with updates. [1] http://www.raspberry-projects.com/pi/pi-hardware/sd-cards http://www.raspberry-projects.com/pi/pi-hardware/sd-cards
- pletnes 9y ago
  I have a 30 GB OS partition on my ubuntu box. That works nicely. Obviously you won’t be doing big data analyses, but everything runs fine, and with lots of apps installed. Raspbian runs on 128 MB RAM or whatever.
  - katastic 9y ago
    I do all my fun dev work with Linux ported onto an old Chromebook with a 27 GB eMMC (~SSD). I've got Clang, LLVM, D (DMD, LDC, AND GDC), Allegro from source, Allegro binaries. A custom compile of the Linux kernel, a custom compile of gdb with better D support. I use a 32 GB SD card for extra stuff like ebooks, but the main drive still has 3 GB of space to play around with after all that junk.

by dpark 9y ago

kashprime 9y ago

I fought this battle with a 64GB SSD, and gave up and cloned the drive onto a hybrid SSD/7200RPM drive (using EaseUS). I can't imagine what you went through to get it to fit on 30GB!

cesarb 9y ago

> (Likely also a bad experience with modern Linux on 30gb.) I just did an install of modern Linux (the latest CentOS 7, with Gnome deskop), so I can check. The root partition is using at the moment 4.2G, plus a 2.0G swap partition and a 1.0G boot partition. So if this were a 30G disk, I'd have more than 20G left, even after installing a few applications.

dpark 9y ago
That’s a fair bit smaller than I’d expect honestly. I’m surprised it’s not using more than that with the basic apps installed.
- CydeWeys 9y ago
  There's plenty of serious Linux distros that still ship on a single CD. Arch Linux, for example, comes on a 522 MB ISO. That gets you a basic functional desktop environment, and anything else you might need can be installed from the Net.
  - dpark 9y ago
    Interestingly, Ubuntu requires 25 GB. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequirements https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/SystemRequire... So consumer-oriented distros don't seem to be nearly so much lighter than Windows. With the caveat that Ubuntu probably comes preloaded with more apps like Libre Office.
    - CydeWeys 9y ago
      A decent amount of that space ends up being on-disk swap for the RAM, for what it's worth. And note that, on that same page, Xubuntu and Lubuntu are offered up as alternatives for less performant computers. They only require 5 GB of space. Windows doesn't have a light version like that.
    - pletnes 9y ago
      That still leaves plenty of space for additional apps and data. Also you can uninstall e.g. Libreoffice post-install to slim it down.
    - vetinari 9y ago
      That's probably just a CYA requirement. I have 17.10 in a VM and it takes 8,7 GB on the disk, with a few extra apps compared to default install.
    - Izkata 9y ago
      That's probably more generous than necessary. I just installed Ubuntu 16.04 a month ago (new laptop), and with /home/ on its own partition, after installing everything I use regularly, root is only using 9.3G
  - 9y ago
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

jenscow 9y ago

> Who buys a laptop with only 30 GB of storage? Somebody who doesn't work in the IT industry - the target demographic of Windows. I'm also surprised it's possible - but if it cuts the price, then why not? I assume 10GB more than the minimum is enough to earn the Windows badge. But I don't think the crux of the issue was lack of disk space.

user5994461 9y ago
For reference, a 32GB SD card is $10 and a TB disk is $40.
- estebank 9y ago
  When the entire laptop is $300, the difference between those two is 10% of the consumer facing cost. And somebody buying a $300 computer clearly doesn't think (or doesn't know) they need 1 TB of storage.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    I gave example on a 1 TB because that's what I could find. Maybe the manufacturers could have 128GB disks for as little costs as the memory card.

Decade 9y ago

> Who buys a laptop with only 30 GB of storage? I didn’t even know that was possible these days. Ultra-cheap computers with MMC flash drives with pathetic read-write speeds. And pathetic other parts. Such as this charmer from Walmart. https://www.walmart.com/ip/Teqnio-ELL1103T-11-6-Laptop-Touchscreen-2-in-1-Windows-10-Home-Intel-Cherrytrail-Z8350-Processor-2GB-RAM-32GB-Flash-Drive/55474684 https://www.walmart.com/ip/Teqnio-ELL1103T-11-6-Laptop-Touch...

CydeWeys 9y ago
I don't understand the thought process behind cheaping out as much as possible on a terrible PC, then paying for many hours of work from a tech to try to get a pathetic machine to be usable. The correct course of action is to return the faulty machine and buy a better one, rather than throwing away the money on a tech who can really only do so much with such inferior hardware. It also boggles my mind how, still to this day, it's so hard to get a lower cost desktop or laptop that ships with an SSD, despite the fact that SSDs offer up such a performance improvement that many people consider them mandatory. The average consumer will have a much better experience with a computer that ships with a 128 GB SSD than a 1 TB HDD, yet every manufacturer is offering plenty of the latter (at 5400 rpm no less) and none of the former at sane price points. The two components even have similar costs now. In this era of streaming everything, the average person really isn't using much hard drive space. I know that my non-technical family members certainly aren't. I just got my mom a $450 refurbished 2012 Dell workstation for common desktop use (mostly email and word processing). She loves it. It's night-and-day faster than the machine it replaced. And the single biggest performance improvement in it comes from, you guessed it, the SSD. A $450 five-year-old used workstation is trouncing any modern desktop in the sub-$1,000 range in practical performance. I would've gotten her a new one, but couldn't find anything in the price range that has an SSD, and the kinds of computers that do ship with SSDs also tend to have unnecessarily upgraded (and costly) processors and graphics cards, which are only useful for gaming. (Oh, and the used workstation has a Core i7 in it too, so it's not exactly a slouch along any dimension except for 3D graphics performance.)
- user5994461 9y ago

DanBC 9y ago

16GB https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1K665X7312 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1K665X7... https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6R46267218 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6R46267... AS you're an MS employee you'll know about WIMBoot and whatever the newer less stupid version of WIMBoot is.

dpark 9y ago
Those are ChromeBooks, not Windows laptops. Also, I'd never heard of WIMBoot. Being a Microsoft employee doesn't make me a Windows expert. I don't work on Windows and don't own any systems that WIMBoot targets. Looking at WIMBoot, it doesn't seem relevant for the case discussed here, either, since this client clearly didn't have the small space usage WIMBoot enables.
- DanBC 9y ago
  https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAAG56KU1351&cm_re=windows_laptop-_-9SIAAG56KU1351-_-Product https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAAG56KU1... https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAF136G48784&cm_re=windows_laptop-_-9SIAF136G48784-_-Product https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAF136G48... https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAC4Z6CZ4439&cm_re=windows_laptop-_-1TS-000D-02370-_-Product https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAC4Z6CZ4... https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA24G6DV4649&cm_re=windows_laptop-_-9SIA24G6DV4649-_-Product https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA24G6DV4... https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6R46JS9643&cm_re=windows_laptop-_-1TS-000X-00N58-_-Product https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6R46JS9... etc etc. There are very many machines sold now, today, with Windows 10 (and previously Windows 8) that have only 32 GB drive space. With WIMBoot any updates would eat drive space and that space was not recoverable, and this would sometimes prevent updating to Windows 10. MS says this here: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2015/03/16/how-windows-10-achieves-its-compact-footprint/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2015/03/16/how-w... > The reason Windows 8.1 devices using WIMBOOT are not yet able to upgrade to Windows 10 is because many of the WIMBOOT devices have very limited system storage. That presents a challenge when we need to have the Windows 8.1 OS, the downloaded install image, and the Windows 10 OS available during the upgrade process. We do this because we need to be able to restore the machine back to Windows 8.1 if anything unexpected happens during the upgrade, such as power loss. In sum, WIMBOOT devices present a capacity challenge to the upgrade process and we are evaluating a couple of options for a safe and reliable upgrade path for those devices. There's a complex workaround of "delete everything, and use two USB sticks" which isn't great for the target user. The new file compression stuff is much much better than WIMBoot.

jancsika 9y ago

> (Likely also a bad experience with modern Linux on 30 GB.) Literally just typed "raspbian minimum card size" in Google and Google dug up this as the top result: "/Pi Hardware /SD Cards. The minimum size SD card you can use for Rasbian is 2GB, but it is recommended to get a 4GB SD card or above. Card Speed. A Class 4 card, which is the minimum recommended has an average read/write speed of 4 MB/sec." The default packages include things like webkit and libre office, so it looks to be a fully functional Linux install on a popular piece of hardware. Now, 4GB still seems dangerously small. But if all a client wanted was office plus web, I bet someone like OP could make a workable system within that size limit without Raspbian filling the emptied space with updates. [1] http://www.raspberry-projects.com/pi/pi-hardware/sd-cards http://www.raspberry-projects.com/pi/pi-hardware/sd-cards

pletnes 9y ago
I have a 30 GB OS partition on my ubuntu box. That works nicely. Obviously you won’t be doing big data analyses, but everything runs fine, and with lots of apps installed. Raspbian runs on 128 MB RAM or whatever.
- katastic 9y ago
  I do all my fun dev work with Linux ported onto an old Chromebook with a 27 GB eMMC (~SSD). I've got Clang, LLVM, D (DMD, LDC, AND GDC), Allegro from source, Allegro binaries. A custom compile of the Linux kernel, a custom compile of gdb with better D support. I use a 32 GB SD card for extra stuff like ebooks, but the main drive still has 3 GB of space to play around with after all that junk.