

PC Makers Find New Ways to Destroy User Experience - besttechie
http://www.besttechie.com/2012/11/17/pc-makers-destroy-user-experience/

======
Apreche
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?

~~~
gojomo
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...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/15/3076519/vizio-reboot-pc-american-
hdtv-success-do-it-again)

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.

~~~
w1ntermute
> 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...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/23/3169716/vizio-15-6-inch-thin-light-
ultrabook-review)

1: [http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/1/3411560/vizio-14-inch-
thin...](http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/1/3411560/vizio-14-inch-thin-light-
ultrabook-review)

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ChuckMcM
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 ?

~~~
dangrossman
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.

~~~
ChuckMcM
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
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
"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
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
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"

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dbecker
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.

~~~
revscat
To borrow a meme: why not both?

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DougWebb
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.

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robot
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.

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ishansharma
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.

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

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

~~~
AmVess
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.

~~~
dangrossman
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.

~~~
AmVess
Wow, that's crazy.

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billirvine
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.

0?

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

~~~
z92
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.

