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That space has to accomodate more than just the data you produce. Big budget modern games have 10-20GB footprints. Visual Studio 2012 needs almost 10GB before

That space has to accomodate more than just the data you produce. Big budget modern games have 10-20GB footprints. Visual Studio 2012 needs almost 10GB before you have written a single line of code. Office is another 3-5GB and most people install that. If you have 8GB of RAM, you're going to have a multi-gigabyte swap file and a ~8GB hibernation file on the disk. There's another 10-15GB gone. I have a laptop that was partitioned similarly to the one in the article. It has a 160GB SSD. It came with two restore partitions a bit over 20GB in size. Windows 8 and the drivers alone used up almost 70GB of what was left. I started out with about 60GB of 160GB free (don't ask where the other ~10 gigabytes went, I have no idea). I have nothing installed but a code editor, Photoshop, Chrome, Thunderbird, a git and SSH clients. I keep no music, large documents or videos -- they're all in cloud services. My HD is 30GB bigger than the 128GB SSDs a lot of these new computers are shipping with, and I regularly have to find files to delete and run "disk cleanup" to purge system temp directories just to keep from running out. You need more work space than you'd think just to operate. Carrying around more than a few albums of music isn't even an option.

AmVess 14y ago
You can set swap to 512MB and suffer no ill. Some people disable swap altogether, but some apps may need it. You can also disable hibernation if you really need the space. Also, WinDirStat is a great program that gives a graphical display of what's on the drive. It's a must-have program for SSD owners on Windows.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
I completely agree that software vendors have no respect for storage consumption, because by and large its been 'free.' When I installed Photoshop last it had a freakin' HD tutorial video as part of the install. 10 - 15GB of 'clip art' is nothing to these guys. But this is where we diverge perhaps. The author of this piece is screaming about the lack of space on the lowest end version of this Lenovo model, why? He isn't the target market if he (like you and I) want a couple hundred GB free to put things into. No, the target market for a 128GB machine is someone who doesn't have photoshop or world of warcraft or Autocad installed on their machine, rather they are probably someone who just surfs the web, consumes stuff online, and wants to keep a modest music collection around. So if you aren't writing code and you aren't doing photo or video editing or any of a dozen storage intensity things with your laptop, then "only" 40 - 50GB is fine.
- dangrossman 14y ago
  The casual market buys Office for homework, and Skyrim and Diablo to play after classes, and now has no space for anything. Laptops with so little disk space haven't existed in almost a decade. The switch from spinning metal to SSDs is a new thing outside of us developers and creatives. If we're not the target market, then they're trying to create a new market, as no other is used to so little storage on any type of computer.
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    "If we're not the target market, then they're trying to create a new market, as no other is used to so little storage on any type of computer." I believe that Microsoft is under the impression that 'tablets' are a fad, what people really want are touch enabled laptops with real keyboards. They want to sell this product to iPad / Nexus users. Folks who want to use this for anything other than casual computing will know to get the one with 'more disk.' But that is just my opinion.
    - overcyn 14y ago
      I don't understand why your defending this. Do you support this practice? 32 GB partitioned off for apparently no purpose? Also, I've always hated the "you aren't the target audience" argument. Lenovo sells a device advertised as having 128GB SSD. But because its targeted for casuals its okay that less than half of that is available? Are they not worthy of getting what they thought they purchased?
      - ChuckMcM 14y ago
        Interesting comment, I don't think of myself of as 'defending' the practice so much as picking apart the original author's argument. The original author is claiming injury [1] based on the available space of the disk in a 128G Lenovo Voyager not being 128GB. On its face that is a silly claim because you have to have some space for other things like the OS and tools. Further no laptop that ships with a 128GB with any OS today gives you, the user 128GB of space to play with. So really the argument would have to rest on the delta between the space available on a completely 'cleaned' machine (all crapware deleted) and a 'fresh' machine. So if the author really needed 128GB of space, they should get the 256GB Voyager 13, since the additional 128GB all is available to the user. Then regardless of the weird partitioning he isn't injured. Now the author could have talked about value, the cost of the device versus the available space and compared that to other models, the author could have talked about system performance, or any number of things but instead they make this claim that 40 - 50Gb of available space is a 'ruined user experience'. Which doesn't seem well supported by his argument. It could be supported by market acceptance but that remains to be seen. As for my feelings on the practice of stuffing all this stuff into the machine, I expect that to sort itself out by people not buying the small disk machine. But of the choice of having a less expensive machine that I spend some time deleting crapware from and having a more expensive machine? I'll take the cheaper one. I may certainly be in a minority there. [1] The injury claim is for "ruining the user experience"

AmVess 14y ago

You can set swap to 512MB and suffer no ill. Some people disable swap altogether, but some apps may need it. You can also disable hibernation if you really need the space. Also, WinDirStat is a great program that gives a graphical display of what's on the drive. It's a must-have program for SSD owners on Windows.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

I completely agree that software vendors have no respect for storage consumption, because by and large its been 'free.' When I installed Photoshop last it had a freakin' HD tutorial video as part of the install. 10 - 15GB of 'clip art' is nothing to these guys. But this is where we diverge perhaps. The author of this piece is screaming about the lack of space on the lowest end version of this Lenovo model, why? He isn't the target market if he (like you and I) want a couple hundred GB free to put things into. No, the target market for a 128GB machine is someone who doesn't have photoshop or world of warcraft or Autocad installed on their machine, rather they are probably someone who just surfs the web, consumes stuff online, and wants to keep a modest music collection around. So if you aren't writing code and you aren't doing photo or video editing or any of a dozen storage intensity things with your laptop, then "only" 40 - 50GB is fine.

dangrossman 14y ago
The casual market buys Office for homework, and Skyrim and Diablo to play after classes, and now has no space for anything. Laptops with so little disk space haven't existed in almost a decade. The switch from spinning metal to SSDs is a new thing outside of us developers and creatives. If we're not the target market, then they're trying to create a new market, as no other is used to so little storage on any type of computer.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  "If we're not the target market, then they're trying to create a new market, as no other is used to so little storage on any type of computer." I believe that Microsoft is under the impression that 'tablets' are a fad, what people really want are touch enabled laptops with real keyboards. They want to sell this product to iPad / Nexus users. Folks who want to use this for anything other than casual computing will know to get the one with 'more disk.' But that is just my opinion.
  - overcyn 14y ago
    I don't understand why your defending this. Do you support this practice? 32 GB partitioned off for apparently no purpose? Also, I've always hated the "you aren't the target audience" argument. Lenovo sells a device advertised as having 128GB SSD. But because its targeted for casuals its okay that less than half of that is available? Are they not worthy of getting what they thought they purchased?
    - ChuckMcM 14y ago
      Interesting comment, I don't think of myself of as 'defending' the practice so much as picking apart the original author's argument. The original author is claiming injury [1] based on the available space of the disk in a 128G Lenovo Voyager not being 128GB. On its face that is a silly claim because you have to have some space for other things like the OS and tools. Further no laptop that ships with a 128GB with any OS today gives you, the user 128GB of space to play with. So really the argument would have to rest on the delta between the space available on a completely 'cleaned' machine (all crapware deleted) and a 'fresh' machine. So if the author really needed 128GB of space, they should get the 256GB Voyager 13, since the additional 128GB all is available to the user. Then regardless of the weird partitioning he isn't injured. Now the author could have talked about value, the cost of the device versus the available space and compared that to other models, the author could have talked about system performance, or any number of things but instead they make this claim that 40 - 50Gb of available space is a 'ruined user experience'. Which doesn't seem well supported by his argument. It could be supported by market acceptance but that remains to be seen. As for my feelings on the practice of stuffing all this stuff into the machine, I expect that to sort itself out by people not buying the small disk machine. But of the choice of having a less expensive machine that I spend some time deleting crapware from and having a more expensive machine? I'll take the cheaper one. I may certainly be in a minority there. [1] The injury claim is for "ruining the user experience"