News Microsoft details Windows 10 space savings

Aw I was hoping they'd have done something about the excessively huge winsxs folder (or whatever it's called). Seems to me re-using existing system files for system recovery is a TERRIBLE idea though. A very probable reason for wanting to do a full system recovery is because the system files are corrupt in some way (either by disk damage or viruses).

However, I am in favor of compressing the system files. I do that now. On modern hardware it only improves performance, while saving disk space. I don't think it should be enabled on phones though. I'm not sure how big the Windows Phone OS is but I haven't heard anyone complain about its size. CPU and RAM though, those are much more limiting resources on phones, so I really don't think compression is a good idea for phones.

 

The winsxs folder isn't actually that large it's just explorer doesn't account for hard links so a single file gets counted twice when calculating how much space it's taking up.

A virus or corruption preventing a full system recovery can be said of the current recovery partition only with a hidden recovery partition it's much harder to address the problem due to it being hidden.

Re-using existing system files for system recovery seems a much better way of doing things to me as you won't need to re-apply any updates and even though I'm not sure how Windows keeps track of system file integrity when using SFC /scannow wouldn't they use a similar technique to reduce the chance of system files becoming corrupted/infected?

If things go really wrong you can always use the manually create recovery media.

 

I need to look into how to do that, and try it out on one of mine.

 

Need to point out some programs [admittedly probably nothing you'd be running on a tablet], spaz out royally if NTFS compression is turned on...

 

I remember that used to be a problem but I'm not really sure that applies anymore. If MS intends to compress the entire drive, I can't imagine it's still an issue.

@Corky42
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the design was so software links their libraries to the winsxs folder, not the other way around. That being said, there shouldn't be many links inside winsxs. Either way - the folder comes with far more libraries than it needs to. I'd rather just have the libraries I actually need installed, not just a random collection of "here's a few thousand things you might need, but there's a good chance this isn't sufficient".

 

IIRC the only one that i recall having major problems now say 'turn it off' or turn it off for their files... the problem comes if you turn it on *after* the program is installed...

 

Damn, that's a damned sight easier than I was expecting. I was readying myself for a pony trek into the deepest recesses of the registry.

 

My £99 HP Stream 7 tablet (bought for the free Office 365 subscription and 1TB of OneDrive space bundled with it) runs 8.1 on very tight hardware and still performs admirably thanks to WIMBoot, and I personally find it to be excellent.

I think Microsoft get a lot of stick for much of what happened in the past, understandably so, but they're really making some good moves now (that Ballmer is gone)...and this is one of them. My Lumia 930 outperforms every phone in the office at work, the Surface Pro is now a cracking piece of kit, and Windows 10 is looking awesome.

 

Shhh.... last time I stated that people started arguing. The funny thing is Ubuntu is considered bloated, for linux.

 

You would think (me to) that how you describe it working is how it works, but going on info from here it's the other way around.

EDIT: Then again from what I'm reading here it works as you describe, talk about confusing.

 

I agree, but isn't Windows Server a lot like that? I never directly used a Windows Server setup on a PC so I don't really know.

For the extreme minimalist, there's Windows PE (or whatever it's called now).

 

I tried it out on my Linx 10. It took a couple of hours or so, which used surprisingly little battery, and I don't notice any slowdowns - it's just as snappy as before.

BTW, has anyone run ATTO SSD benchmarks on these? I don't know if the compression affects it but the read scores were off the chart. Write speeds were more believable in the 200-250MB/s range - similar to a SATA2 SSD - but I was getting 1300+ megabytes per second reads.

 

I guess it is possible - if your normal maximum read speed is 250MB/s but you have a 1.3GB file compressed into less than 250MB, then your CPU and RAM is handling most of the load.

I've done an experiment where I tried running a game off of a DVD. In once instance I left the files in-tact, accounting for roughly 2.5GB of data. In another instance I put the game in a squashFS archive, shrinking the contents to about 350MB. It could take up to 2 minutes to load a level with the non-compressed files, but it took maybe 20 seconds to read from squashFS. Note that it isn't just the compressed data that makes loading faster. For mechanical storages, like DVDs or hard drives, the seek time dramatically decreases because the file contents are more concentrated. Seek time is the primary reason why HDDs are so slow. When doing sequential reads, both mediums have very modest performance.

 

I'm going to run the same benchmark on the Linx 7, as I haven't compressed that one yet.

 

Wondering if when you install windows, drop down to a cmd prompt and create the required partitions as compressed to begin with.

Would that work?