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0 pointscwyers10y ago0 comments

It feels like the Surface 3 is coming out a few months too early in some respects, as the disk space improvements in Windows 10 are going to make it a lot more palatable on the $499 model:

http://blogs.windows.com/bloggingwindows/2015/03/16/how-wind...

0 comments

drzaiusapelord10y ago

This is my feeling as well. I just don't want a Windows 8 machine. Its clear it was a transition OS full of compromise, half cooked ideas, and a "lets just ship" mentality, which MS had to embrace considering it was practically a non-player in the mobile space in 2012.

I'm hoping 10 comes out with a more refined understanding of modern OS expectations, especially when your OS is both a desktop and mobile OS. I find it amusing that 8 came out with this large install size when SSDs were becoming the norm. I guess Redmond can't move fast enough to avoid this outcome. They saw 1TB drives being the norm in 2009-2010-ish when they started this project and couldn't pivot fast enough to stop it. Now things like the sxs folder being 20gb is the norm. Or still defaulting to a 1996-like "make your swap file twice 2x your RAM size" mentality. I have 16gb of RAM. I sure as hell don't need a 32gb swap file.

The only reason I have a swap file is because DirectX seems to expect one for many games, so I have a token 512mb one just for gaming. No other application expects one. MS really needs to contemporize with Win10. There's just way too much legacy cruft in 7 and 8. Win8 on that sexy Surface hardware is like driving your Ferarri on a dirt road.

MichaelGG10y ago

The Windows memory model is different. With some OSes, you can happily over allocate and everything's great. Malloc won't fail, and so long not every page ends up being touched, you're fine. But as soon as you go over, bam OOM killer.

On Windows, every allocation gets reserved by actual memory, so it's easier to run into a situation where you would start failing malloc. So having swap is more important.

Also, I think that anonymous mmap is backed by the pagefile. So anything using mmap without specifying a file is going to increase your pagefile needs.

bandrami10y ago

> especially when your OS is both a desktop and mobile OS

I'm curious: does anybody besides OS developers want this to be the case? I don't want the way I interact with a tablet to be the way I interact with a laptop or a desktop.

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