Forget about those pesky closures, Windows 10 has an important message for you Welcome to another instalment of The Register's occasional series reminding IT professionals to check their public facing orifices. Today's bork comes from purveyor of flatpack furniture and specialists in cashdesk queuing, IKEA. No stranger to unhappy digital signage, the homeware giant has form when it comes to not giving …
"There wasn't even any tea in the supermarket the other day. Or milk."
I'm sure there were plenty of HOARDERS there to prevent anyone ELSE from having any before THEY get to it... (with nothing better to do than create shortages for EVERYONE ELSE).
as for Win-10-nic on a kiosk - it's like a self-inflicted wound.
got, Linux?
That's what happens when you do not stockpile powered milk/dried milk. I always keep a can around because one of the first things that disappears during emergencies like this is milk due to it's low shell life.
And tea? You can stockpile it for years.
Low shelf-life? On the shelf, milk doesn't even last for a day... In the refrigerator, you might get a week out of it. In the freezer, though, mlk will be just fine for months. Can't say I've tried keeping it for years at a time, personally. Just give it 3 days in the refrigerator to thaw out, and a good shake to ensure it stays homogenized.
There is long life milk that doesn't need cold, but gets bad if it gets exposed to too much heat.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-temperature_processing
You really never ever saw long life milk before? It has a shell life of about three months in average.
Hmmm, here in "the Pearl of the Orient" (Hong Kong) there's no shortage of Milk !
Sod the Tea! That's what my HK Chinese wife quaffs [without milk]
I need instant Coffee, and that's easily acquired in the Supermarkets.
As for MILK ----> there's plenty of that; I much prefer full cream "Jersey (UHT) milk" from 759 Shop, though they do also have skimmed *&* semi-skimmed milk!
At little more than a Quid a Litre, they bring back long suppressed memories of drinking Jersey milk out of glass bottles back in UK in the 60's.
That was shortly before I saw the sense of getting out of 'nose-diving' "Darling Harold" Wilson's misruled UK.
Odd that there wasn't any fresh milk, just as I found it odd there weren't any eggs at my supermarket last week. Even though hoarding comes from a place of panic and selfishness, and hoarders are basically antisocial assholes, at least I understand why people do it.
But really, what's the point of hoarding perishable food?
Just how much is enough ? Windows has long been the specialist in eating up the disk space, nice to see that the latest version is keeping with tradition.
Microsoft has always considered that it has the entire disk to itself. Partitions ? Yeah, it's heard of them - there's even a built-in tool since, I think, Vista, but if you actually want your OS on one partition and your data on another it's a world of nuisance to get it done, and there are still parts that cannot be elsewhere than on C: - whether you like it or not.
So yeah, dumping all the security updates on C:, what can possibly go wrong ?
It,s been a long time since I used windows. All new Windows is a fallacy still updates in the same way. It creates a rollback point and keep previous updates until it has no more storage to download and install the updates. The assumption is that some one is there to clean up the crud so the kiosk can continue to function. I don't know how much storage they have but I'm sure it's not a lot. I do like the meatballs through.
"Just how much is enough ?"
'all of it' plus 10% ?
early on I noticed that Win-10-nic does NOT clean up after itself when it "up"dates/grades. And so you can expect it to grow like *THE BLOB*
"Beware of The Blob it creeps, and leaps, and glides, and slides across the floor..." [Burt Bacharach, 1959 I think - theme song for the movie of the same name - "The Blob"]
Windows will remove old files and update-related downloads after a month. The time delay for the former is so that any unforeseen problems can be easily rolled back, and so that updates can be shared among other PCs on the network for the latter.
If you don't want to wait, you can always run disk-cleanup manually.
>Windows will remove old files and update-related downloads after a month.
Bet when W10 is showing the error seen at Ikea, normal housekeeping procedures such as this get put on hold or even better actually get done but the update process displaying the message doesn't get updated to the new state. So when some poor engineer takes a look there is a practically empty HDD...
how is this going to work well on a system that's in a kiosk?
*crickets*
You have conveniently ignored the previous line, "Windows deletes old versions 30 days after the update".
So no, not "crickets". This is a classic example of Linux / Apple fanboi blind Windows-bashing when it's not justified. If the computer had been set up properly in the first place, this wouldn't have happened - so don't blame MS for this. Heaven knows, there are plenty perfectly valid criticisms - this just doesn't look like one of them.
@ChrisBedford
I have a Windows 10 Pro VM that was running 1809 (yes, I avoid features updates as long as coitally possible). It occupied a scant 74GB on my host file system. One day as it inevitably comes to pass with WaaS, it updated to 1903. Then it occupies over 100GB*.
Yes I ran Disk cleanup. Yes I chose to find and delete system files, restore points (who needs these with a VM that is backed up regularly) and previous installations. Now it occupies 95GB. That about 20GB for a feature upgrade I neither needed or wanted.
* That means a minimum of about 25GB of storage overhead for windows 10 feature upgrades in addition to normal workload overhead All in all, windows 10 and its upgrade system is the worst anyone can imagine..
Not sure what you're doing there then. What else do you have installed on that VM?
According to TreeSize, the top five folders (in fact the only folders of significant size) on the system drive of my main work PC at home (with Windows 10 1909) are:
16.3GB - Users (Including >2GB of Vivaldi cache, and 1.3GB of emails.)
16.2GB - Windows
12.6GB - Program Files (x86) (over half of which is Visual Studio 2019 and the Windows SDK).
10.7GB - Program Files
7.1GB - ProgramData
Plus a 16GB page file.
The point of my post is not the absolute size of the VM. Obviously it has several significant applications installed otherwise what would be the point of making it? Windows is an OS and an OS, by definition, is an infrastructure and environment that can support and run applications. I fail to see why some folks seem to believe that Windows 10 has any intrinsic value all by its lonesome.
The point of my post is that Windows 10 upgrades and many updates waste device resources that can be used instead to provide capabilities to the tasks we need to do on the bloody thing.
In my case, significant storage is used for content resources needed for content creation as well as engineering and development tools. And if I to a rough sum, your "at home" Windows PC has something like 77GB occupied by the page file and top 5 folders. That seems suspiciously similar to my VM PRIOR to the 1903 update. Note that it's been more than 30 days and I still can't purge the VM file system of the previous, 1803, installation.
Wondering why I was using so much space on my C: partition a couple of weeks ago I found that my entire photo partition was duplicated into the "Documents and settings" section, but hadn't been visible. At some point Windows must have decided that it belonged there.
That is not one of the 2 places that I keep data or backups on the machine, nor ever would. I have partitions for photo and video and their backups on a different partition and internal hdd and a pair of external ones too.
I've kept C: quite small just OS and software, to allow other partitions with data on my main drive - and the secondary drives are all for backups. So I did not appreciate finding that. I now have 160GB out of a 250GB partition free. It had been down to <80
Windows built in partitioning tool is almost completely useless. Fine for shrinking to create additional new partitions or removing whole partitions, but that's all. It will shrink the partition on only one side ( right I think) to create a new partition there.
If you try to redistribute space it will only shrink on the one side or allow the adjacent partition to grow on the equivalent ( i.e. far) side where there is no space.
So, in the screen shot I can't grow the left partition, having shrunk the right one ( should I need to)
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yb1oumek4hpgmyy/hdd%20spaces.jpg?dl=0
Of course I use 3rd party s/w instead.
Windows cannot rest on its laurels, though.
My Moto G5 was complaining of insufficient storage space, and suggested I could clear the cache of a few apps. One of the suggested apps was Messages (which sends and receives SMSs).
Messages had amassed around 900MB of cache files, and I still can't fathom how or why it could store so much ephemera. I mean, the cache isn't sent/received messages, it's just, well, I don't know
>Partitions ? Yeah, it's heard of them
But only for its own comsumption.
A clean install of W10 will happily create 4 partitions, only 1 of which is "C:\" and user accessible.
It amused me that doing a vanila install from MS supplied media that W10 automatically creates an OEM recovery partition without giving me any option in the matter; furthermore I'm not aware of any OEM that provides a recovery partition image (and tools) that I can download and install into this reserved partition.
Oh iOS can be just as bad..possibly worse. I have a Mac Mini on my desk (purely for building Xamarin apps I hasten to add). Every now and then it will refuse to build or to apply an XCode update because it doesn't have enough space. When I investigate what is using all the space I find out that it's 'System'.
"" "not giving Windows 10 enough headroom"
Just how much is enough ? Windows has long been the specialist in eating up the disk space, nice to see that the latest version is keeping with tradition.
Microsoft has always considered that it has the entire disk to itself.""
Last year, here in Hong Kong, I acquired a Laptop from a far from far-thinking manufacturer (an Asus) sold to me by a young lady who said that she was going to UK.
I was far from "chuffed" when I tried to update it on a 32GB SSD - It was totally unable to surrender the required SSD "space" - tho' I did much later discover that this "problem" could be got around by using an additional "Thumbdrive" of ~16GB.
Farting around like that was not my forte, so I wiped the SSD clean & replaced the original W10 perversion with its latest creation which fitted okay.
Not wanting to every be limited to *having* to reinstall sometime later, I promptly sold it - at a profit via a GeoExpat website here in the "Pearl of the Orient".
It isn't really Ikea's fault; they will only have followed Microsoft's own inadequate advice on the minimum specs required for Win10. You will remember that the first generation of netbooks had only 32GB of SSD storage that quickly filled up with bloat preventing updates from being applied. This kiosk is suffering from the same problem.
I easily fit a Linux image in 16Gb on a micro SD card with more than enough room to spare, with chromium, a web server, custom daemons, and short instructional videos, yotta yotta yotta, operating in 'kiosk mode' on a Raspberry Pi. Set it up properly [and config the browser to only check for updates after 1000 years have passed] and you're all set! Well, you DO have to code it properly...
[and if you're worried about the GPL, you can try FreeBSD instead]
So will never install on a 32Gb eMMC machine where Win10 already uses more than 20Gb of the 28 or so Gb of actual usable space.
I have moved everything possible to a USB stick (update folder, filesystem, etc)....no joy.
Why do you write an update that even when the update cache is on a different disk insists on still trying to reserve it on C:?????
"If they have shut the stores what happens to all the people still lost in there that have been surviving on meatballs for months?"
They are probably safer than we are ..... if they are lost in time & Ikeaspace, so is Covid-19, 'never the twain shall meet' !!!
I would also bet that the Covid-19 drug treatment will be found growing on a discarded meatball, in a dim dark lonely corner of 'Ikeaspace' with all the missing 'odd socks', 'garden gnomes' and 'strange SCSI cables'.
:) ;)
I don't know when it happened but Windows is a disaster and has been for some time. Forget running a older version of Windows even if it is EOL because now Microsoft has turned off activation for anything older than Windows 7. I run software that doesn't work so well with Windows 10 just because and I have been using older versions until they just stopped working. I was able to move the software to Debian Linux and use Wine to run the windows programs that I am using. Turns out that works better than using Windows (even older versions).
I don't think stores like IKEA and many others don't bother with updates on the machines that have their only job is at running one thing forever. They would be better to use Linux for such a task.
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