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Comment by IanDrake | Hacker News Reader

I can solve his problem for $21.64 on Amazon: http://amzn.to/XhLWTY

This guys is a fool. Let's be glad his target is MS and not some startup that didn't live up to his "expectations".

Here's an ars technica article going into details about why "STFU and buy an SD card" isn't necessarily a solution.

"As such, even the 16GB that Microsoft promises on the 32GB Surface may not be readily available to end-users. Surface does, at least, have a way of adding storage that Windows itself will never use for its own needs; it has a microSD slot that works with 64GB cards.

There are wrinkles to this support, however. Due to the sandboxing and security used in Windows RT, apps need special permission to use this removable storage. Apps that just have permission to access your music, picture, or document libraries can't use the SD card. Worse, it's not possible to add removable storage to the existing libraries; Windows requires that all library locations be indexed. As a result, it won't index removable storage, presumably on the basis that it might get removed, which would cause the index to include information about files that no longer existed.

There is a trick involving Junction Points to make Windows not realize that the SD card is an SD card, but that is hardly what one would call elegant or easy-to-use."

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/surface-disk-space-a-...

That's interesting. You can certainly mount the microSD to a directory off your C drive and relocate your libraries there, but it is involved...

I wonder if it can be automated somehow so the steps get down to: 1) install card 2) run setup program

I'm going to see if I can do this from a autorun program (or otherwise) on the inserted microSD card. Then I'll sell microSD cards with the program on them and make a fortune...Muhhhaahhahhha

I imagine you'd also be happy to buy a car advertised as "seats 5", then you have to spend more money to buy a 5th seat?

EDIT: Let me update my analogy a little - let's say the car is advertised as "seats 5", and when you get it, you can only put a small child in the 5th seat (1/2 a person). To seat a 5th adult, you have to buy an extra seat.

Still happy?

A 32GB iPad doesn't have 32GB of free space either, nor does any computer or device have the advertised space free when pre-loaded with an OS.

So, I'm not sure your analogy works. It's standard for space to be taken for the OS.

50% is more than usual. What is the cut off for being able to sue?

Have you bought any electronic with storage at all in the past 10 years? Not even hard drives come with the advertised storage -- they've had to repurpose what 'GB' means (base-10 instead of base-2).

That's not false advertising. The drives are measured in SI bytes, which is a decimal system.

Did you read my comment?

Yes. Hard drives do in fact come with the advertised storage. Manufacturers rate hard drives in using SI prefixes. Operating systems measure hard drives in binary bytes. It's not false advertising if the measurement system is valid.

That analogy is kind of flawed. If Microsoft specifically advertised 16/32GB of usable space then these arguments would have made sense. This just seems like buying 5 pound ribs at the meat section and then complaining about all the bones. Also how is this different from what other manufacturers are doing? I have Nexus 7 16GB which came with a usable space of ~ 11GB and heck it doesn't even have an expandable memory slot like surface.

Well that does not solves the problem actually. Windows library does not index files stored in the SD card and apps also needs a special permission to access to the SD card. See here http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/11/surface-disk-space-a-....

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