PC Makers Find New Ways to Destroy User Experience | Hacker News Reader

PC Makers Find New Ways to Destroy User Experience

besttechie.com

30 pointsbesttechie48 comments

All this will only ever be solved by one thing and one thing only. Microsoft needs to tell these OEMs that either they give perfectly clean installs of Windows, or they don't get any copies of Windows at all. Think about how many people in the world hate Windows or PCs in general simply because their experience has been ruined by crapware. If Microsoft had never allowed crapware, what would the world look like today?

Microsoft is considered to hold monopoly power in the x86 PC operating system market. Any leverage of that monopoly to reduce competition in a different market would be a violation of antitrust laws. Forbidding manufacturers from entering into agreements to preinstall antivirus software, search toolbars, and other crapware they typically install as a condition of licensing Windows would be such a leverage of power. Thus, they are legally barred from taking your suggestion.

IANAL

How about just buying from places that sell a clean computer without crapware? Yes it will cost more. And watching shows on TV costs more if you want to see them without commercials.

Windows would probably not be as widespread as it is now

This story on Vizio's PCs from summer had a part that suggested the 'Microsoft Signature' program was at least partially an attempt in this direction:

http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/15/3076519/vizio-reboot-pc-am...

The program doesn't seem to have gotten much traction, though, and to the extent it's mentioned at all at Microsoft they are not discussing the "less crapware" angle.

> The program doesn't seem to have gotten much traction, though

Not least because the Vizio PCs in question turned out to be utter crap[0][1].

0: http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/23/3169716/vizio-15-6-inch-th...

1: http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/1/3411560/vizio-14-inch-thin...

This should more accurately be titled, "Why do I only have 60GB available on a 128GB SSD?" And the answer is that "hey its cheap and we're more interested in solving for the worst case rather than the best case."

But it also begs the question, when did "only 40GB" for your files on a laptop become a deal breaker? I'm going to assume that you need every song you've ever heard, every picture you have ever taken with you. Which I kinda see and kinda don't. Why not a carry around a 1TB portable drive? Unless you have to have it online at any instant which gets a bit more perplexing.

That said, ubiquitous high speed data connectivity makes this go away right? There has to be somewhere better to hold your data than in your lap 24/7 ?

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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?

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"

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.

Ok, great discussion and yes I do understand the 'its in the spec why can't I use it' feeling. For disks its pretty straightforward to "see" the consumption and for other things (like RAM) you don't get a clear idea of how much RAM you get to use for your applications vs all the other things hogging RAM [0][1].

Of course in specmanship you can't speak truth when your competitors don't right? So you can't advertise this as "xxGB of disk space" which accurately reflects the amount available to the user any more than you can say 700 Mhz of available CPU power is yours to command. This because brand Y will tell you all of the GB on the disk since that will get them some sales for people who don't read the label closely and are doing number + unit to number + unit comparisons.

When I worked at NetApp the customers would say "Gee you've got n x yyyGB drives in there, how come I don't get that much storage?" And the answer was well there are RAID parity data, OS overhead, snapshots, Etc. Never a very satisfying conversation because they always believe you give them more space if you "tried harder". And the sad thing is that is true, but what wasn't true is that the customer would accept the cost increase of the extra engineering to make it so.

I'm amazed at the changes that dirt cheap magnetic storage has wrought. I've been cleaning out my 'junk box' to make a donation to the Hacker Dojo and came across some speed matched 8MB DIMMs. Yup four speed matched DIMMs for a robust 32MB of memory. About the only thing they are good for, if you're not into 'old' computers, is perhaps geeky jewelry.

The Manual of the Yoga 13 [2] indicates there are 256GB and 512GB disks available, since it didn't look like any of the partitions scaled with storage size (restore partition for example just has to be big enough to hold release images) you can add more space by adding money.

So I totally understand how disappointing it is to see half the drive or more consumed by unknown stuff, but on a larger system that would be a quarter or an eighth of the drive. And I'm sensitive to the 'my laptop is my only machine' argument too (although the natural backup feature of having two machines should not be overlooked!) it is that we've arrived here on the back of super cheap spinning rust, and SSDs don't have quite the economies that rust does.

[0] Not a new issue, see CP/M 80 system advertisements bragging about how much "TPA" you got.

[1] And yes you can run atop(1), Taskmanager, Etc and see how much you're being given access too, but I haven't read much outrage over that at the moment.

[2] http://download.lenovo.com/consumer/mobiles_pub/ideapad_yoga...

Well which is it 40GB available or 60GB available? I can understand how easy it is to be confused because the manufacturer has chosen to burden users with a confusing mess. It's entirely reasonable to expect more than 100GB of usable space, and it's entirely beside the point that some users don't need 100GB.

"It's entirely reasonable to expect more than 100GB of usable space,..."

I would be interested in hearing an argument about 'reasonableness' here. One of the challenges in this particular example is that "we" the readers don't really know what benefit we're getting from each of the consumed gigabytes of storage. So it is currently impossible to know what we're 'giving up' by taking those gigabytes and giving them to the user.

I can understand the perspective that after a certain amount of space, it may not be all that important how much space you have. Further, I can accept that disks ship with less capacity than the "raw" capacity listed in the hardware spec for a plethora of reasons (OS-size, software, etc).

That said, I find it rather silly that a disk ships with a certain amount of free space, but that space is fragmented arbitrarily over a bunch of partitions. Vendor-partitions should have almost no extra space if the vendor doesn't want the user to put things in them (Restore and Driver partitions). Fragmented free space is annoying for users. That , I think, is the salient annoyance expressed by this article.

There are some decent arguments for having big local disks, but very few(if any) good ones for disks that ship with randomly distributed free space.

> But it also begs the question, when did "only 40GB" for your files on a laptop become a deal breaker?

That question was raised -- and not begged -- probably some time around 2005.

@visarg: I doubt you'll see this, but you've been hell-banned for, err, 304 days... ;-(

> visarg 5 hours ago | link [dead] [-] [collapse whole thread]

> iPhone sync. With the pics, music and apps you can easily occupy 32GB.

Expectations. If I pay for a 128 GB SSD drive, I 'expect' to be able to use 128 GB.

While I get that the question may have been largely rhetorical, I like to carry my music collection around on my laptop. I've been accruing it for over 10 years now, and y'know, it has my songs and stuff. While it obviously wouldn't kill me to not have it, having it on my laptop solves the "OMG I need to hear so-and-so, right now".

Also, if I don't have it on my PC, then where? It's a sizable enough collection that hosting it somewhere could get costly (and is, actually, I back it up to S3 [though looking to migrate that to Glacier now]).

Lastly, not everybody has the pervasive bandwidth you speak of. I live in Annapolis, and bandwidth is groovy out here on Verizon FIOS, but (ironically, I suppose) my office in Mountain View has horrible bandwidth.

Other than that, it's hit or miss at coffee shops, and if the bandwidth seems even slightly dodgy, I'd feel like a prick streaming my music over it at everybody else's expense.

Backing up to look at your other question, the 'Only 40Gb' is kind of a big deal. I mean, Microsoft Office and an Adobe suite together probably take up a quarter of that, leaving you at 30Gb, add a few more large applications and it's believable that you're down to 20Gb without any actual user data.

After that, your resume probably takes up a good 4 megs, and then it's on to cat pictures, MP3s and porn, for which 19.999Gb is not nearly adequate.

If you're in MacLand, you have iTunes match which is pretty nice. I'm not sure if there are similar services that are more open wrt target platform.

iTunes Match is available for iTunes under Windows too, but it is unreliable and fairly rubbishy on both. It's also excellent for totally breaking the Music app on my thoroughly updated iPhone 4S when working over cellular data.

Short form: Better keep local copies of all your music anyway.

Really? I've been using it across Mac/iPad/iPhone for almost a year now, and I have had 0 problems with it (my library is a bit under 10k songs)

I contemplated Match, but as I understand it, it also synchronizes deletes -- so that doesn't free me from the obligation of having to have space on disk to play them because I can't delete the local files once they're on the cloud, right?

When it's a SSD, it matters. Those are very expensive. You pay $1300 for this laptop and you're only getting 128 GB, and only half of that you can use. I'll bet he is pissed off about it.

Ok, here is a serious question. Do you think this is his first laptop? (and btw he's commenting on Mossberg's review so he's not out any money)

The criticism that Microsoft would do well to reign in their OEMs putting crapware on their offerings is well taken. But understand that Microsoft got convicted of being a monopolist by being pretty aggressive telling OEMs what they could and could not put on the machines they were selling. If I were Microsoft I would err on the side of not pissing off the Justice department and let the market sort it out.

And by and large if you have purchased a laptop from an OEM with Windows pre-installed in the last 5 years you've noticed that it has a lot of crap on it, and those are 250GB and 500GB drives. So I am hard pressed to believe that any buyer today, given the 'small' size of 128GB of storage, would have any expectation that even half of that would be available without doing a lot of work.

"But it also begs the question, when did "only 40GB" for your files on a laptop become a deal breaker?"

* When a laptop became a person's primary/only computer, like mine used to be.

* When you read "128GB hdd". A reasonable user would expect to have MOST of that space, not less than half.

I have no idea why they created some of these partitions, but when the author calls it a "mystery" partition, he apparently doesn't either.

So I'd treat this as a mystery to be explored, rather than concluding that Lenovo is intentionally sacrificing user experience for no apparent benefit to anyone.

To borrow a meme: why not both?

I can understand having those backup and restore partitions on a regular drive, because most failures on a regular drive will leave most of the drive readable, even if you have to boot from some other media. But for SSDs, failures tend to be catastrophic, don't they? I would expect the entire drive to be unreadable if anything goes wrong.

If this is just for recovering from OS failures rather than hardware failures, I'd much rather have a DVD. It's a lot cheaper than space on the SSD.

Im not surprised it is lenovo again. I bought a lenovo laptop and witnessed the crappiest of software I've ever seen to be installed on top of windows. I bought an additional Windows OEM CD just to get rid of the crap on my computer.

I have noted down my Windows Key and that is all I need. I will just download a pirated copy, make ISO and then activate with genuine key.

That's the only way out since PC manufactures usually don't provide any installation media.

Can't you just wipe them all and reinstall the OS?

You and I could, yes. But

a) Not everyone can

b) We shouldn't have to

My Mac is old and I need to get a new desktop system for home. I've been debating between a reasonably good new Mac or a really really good souped up PC for the same price. These are the things that remind me of why I went with a Mac the last time around despite the fact that I disagree with a lot of Apple's design decisions.

Only if you go out and buy a retail copy of Windows, essentially paying for it twice.

You can download an .iso (from MS) of whatever version of Windows you have and use the serial that came with the device to activate it.

YMMV, but it works on the Thinkpads I own.

From what I've read, Windows 8 machines do not have stickers on them with product keys. There are tons of forum posts on the web of people trying to do clean installs then realizing this fact. I honestly don't know how activation works now.

Wow, that's crazy.

You can't do that right now. Not until next year. Only "upgrade" versions of windows 8 are available. That's why they are so cheap. You can't use them for a clean install. Those will be $100 or more.

You can not in this case. There's no full retail version of Windows 8 available yet.

Okay, let's be real -- why does HN care?

Raise your hands, come one everyone, how many of you would buy a laptop with only 128GB of HD onboard?

How many?

Let's count.

So what's the fuss? This clearly is not designed/marketed for you.

Few years back I was using 500 GB HD on my laptop. But after the emergence of SSDs, I am now happily using only a 128 GB SSD on my laptop and have moved all media, backup and other files to NAS/cloud.

I would have been upset had I found my SSD could only hold 60 GB of user data.

I'm using a Macbook Pro with a 512GB SSD but I dual boot so really if I boot into Mac or Win each only have 128GB available not including what the OS uses of that 128GB.

My plan was to triple boot but not with such limited space.

Oh and the recovery partitions eat up a lot too I haven't checked exactly how much.

It's a solid state drive. Plenty of us have them.

I don't know of any Windows 8 tablets/hybrids with a larger disk than 128GB. I plan to buy the Surface Pro the moment it's available, and 128GB is likely the largest disk that'll have too. Right now I'm on a laptop with a 160GB SSD.

So basically if something doesn't personally effect me I shouldn't care about it?

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