Always know who is on your go-to *insert apocalypse type here* team. You never know when it might come in handy.

The Flying Penguin wrote on Sep 2, 2021, 14:41:

RedEye9 wrote on Sep 2, 2021, 12:55:

Burrito of Peace wrote on Sep 2, 2021, 12:48:

RedEye9 wrote on Sep 2, 2021, 10:04:
They also might be op'ed so much because they're a wear item along with being a non-replaceable part.

Yet another reason to never purchase a product without user serviceable parts.

BoP
How is the Surface marketed.
I mean if they say its 512gb does the user get 512 minus formatting and OS costs.
Or is the 25% also taken off the 512.
Seems like there would have been howls of complaints it it were the latter.

It's marketed by total size of the drive. To be fair, all SSDs are like this. A 512GB SSD should have a 50GB empty partition for OP (10%). The size of the OP on Surfaces is rather extreme. But yeah, it's sold like a glued together phone with no expectation you can service it, so maybe they over, over provision to be safe.

I'm not a fan of unserviceable devices, but I love the Surface. I've tried other 2-in-1s and nothing is really as light, or as thin, or as comfortable to hold as a tablet as a Surface. Yet it's powerful enough to use as a laptop, and my old Surface IS my travel laptop.

Not sure if I've posted here before, but here's a post with photos, a cringe-worthy video, and some detailed instructions on how I cut the back open with a dremel tool to replace the SSD. I feel pretty good about it. I saved an otherwise quite functional Surface tablet from the e-waste bin, and the battery still has plenty of life left: https://www.pcabusers.org/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?p=375300#p375300

ok
If I'm going to be stranded on a desert island I pick you and BoP as my next door neighbors.

I stopped the video when you turned on the Dremel with cutting wheel. I've seen enough horror movies to know how those things turn out.

RedEye9 wrote on Sep 2, 2021, 12:55:

Burrito of Peace wrote on Sep 2, 2021, 12:48:

RedEye9 wrote on Sep 2, 2021, 10:04:
They also might be op'ed so much because they're a wear item along with being a non-replaceable part.

Yet another reason to never purchase a product without user serviceable parts.

BoP
How is the Surface marketed.
I mean if they say its 512gb does the user get 512 minus formatting and OS costs.
Or is the 25% also taken off the 512.
Seems like there would have been howls of complaints it it were the latter.

It's marketed by total size of the drive. To be fair, all SSDs are like this. A 512GB SSD should have a 50GB empty partition for OP (10%). The size of the OP on Surfaces is rather extreme. But yeah, it's sold like a glued together phone with no expectation you can service it, so maybe they over, over provision to be safe.

I'm not a fan of unserviceable devices, but I love the Surface. I've tried other 2-in-1s and nothing is really as light, or as thin, or as comfortable to hold as a tablet as a Surface. Yet it's powerful enough to use as a laptop, and my old Surface IS my travel laptop.

Not sure if I've posted here before, but here's a post with photos, a cringe-worthy video, and some detailed instructions on how I cut the back open with a dremel tool to replace the SSD. I feel pretty good about it. I saved an otherwise quite functional Surface tablet from the e-waste bin, and the battery still has plenty of life left: https://www.pcabusers.org/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?p=375300#p375300

Burrito of Peace wrote on Sep 2, 2021, 12:48:

RedEye9 wrote on Sep 2, 2021, 10:04:
They also might be op'ed so much because they're a wear item along with being a non-replaceable part.

Yet another reason to never purchase a product without user serviceable parts.

BoP
How is the Surface marketed.
I mean if they say its 512gb does the user get 512 minus formatting and OS costs.
Or is the 25% also taken off the 512.
Seems like there would have been howls of complaints it it were the latter.

RedEye9 wrote on Sep 2, 2021, 10:04:
They also might be op'ed so much because they're a wear item along with being a non-replaceable part.

Yet another reason to never purchase a product without user serviceable parts.

The Flying Penguin wrote on Sep 2, 2021, 08:38:
Yeah, I find on my two Surface Pros that they over provision a lot. Not sure if that's a statement on the quality of the SSDs.

They also might be op'ed so much because they're a wear item along with being a non-replaceable part.

Yeah, I find on my two Surface Pros that they over provision a lot. Not sure if that's a statement on the quality of the SSDs.

Verno wrote on Sep 1, 2021, 10:34:
The Windows Update streamline should also please a lot of people,

What is this? First I've heard of it. Will it allow me to install the updates I want, and then turn off the terrible dial-home autoupdate feature forever? Since, that's something I still can't do on Windows 10.

The Flying Penguin wrote on Sep 2, 2021, 00:24:
That empty partition at the end is for over provisioning for the SSD. You should leave some free space at the end of the drive for that.

That I understand but 119GB out of 512 seems excessive. That's quite nearly 25% of the entire drive. If Windows needs that, then there is something deeply wrong with it. None of my Linux installs require 25% of an SSD.

At any rate, I am going to nuke and pave it as I said. What Windows does on its own during the install is not my problem so long as I hand my dad back a functioning tablet.

That empty partition at the end is for over provisioning for the SSD. You should leave some free space at the end of the drive for that.

The Flying Penguin wrote on Sep 1, 2021, 20:25:
Burrito, out of Curiosity, is the SSD failing on the Surface Pro?

Not according to the live Linux USB I was using. I ran "smartctl -t long /dev/sdb" to get a full dump of the SMART data and it looked good. Took about a half hour. Then I did another pass with Gnome Disks to contrast and compare the results. Identical.

He said the last thing he did was a Windows update before he shut it down two days ago.

Now here's the really weird part:

It initially booted to the blue "Couldn't find a bootable operating system" screen. So I USB booted it (with the volume down method) to my Linux rescue environment and recovered all the data he wanted to keep (thank the FSM for nebula). Backup was verified by him as containing everything he wanted to keep. So I ask him "You're fucked anyway, why don't we wipe the disk and install Linux?" He agrees because why not. So I start the install and see the disk isn't fully utilized. There was 119GB (he has the model with 512GB) at the end that didn't even have a partition. So I installed Linux on to that and upon reboot, GRUB listed both the Linux install and Windows. So I select Windows.

And it boots without a single problem. He logs in, everything works exactly as he expects. My only guess is that something happened during the update process that ate the the EFI partition and, when installing GRUB, GRUB saw that and went "That's not bootable but I'll use an EFI shim set to e0f". Then it became bootable because GRUB gave Windows enough of a stub to boot off of.

I'm just going to nuke and pave it on Friday with Win10 Pro 20H2 for him since he has conniptions that his ancient Lumia 920 won't talk to anything but Windows 10.

Burrito, out of Curiosity, is the SSD failing on the Surface Pro?

My 6 year old Surface Pro 3's SSD was failing, and since even iFixit considers the SSD virtually impossible to replace by ordinary means (their guys succeeded, but not without cracking the screen), I tried the dremel tool hack I've seen in several videos. I cut a hole in the back of the case under the kickstand to access the drive. Some genius somewhere posted measurements of where to cut exactly, and even then I nicked the battery, but it worked.

Verno wrote on Sep 1, 2021, 11:46:
There's already a few PS5 games doing it with Sony's API.

It's technically not "Sony's" API. I say "technically" because a lot of the heavy lifting was already done for them by the FreeBSD folks. They put in some dev work, certainly, but they didn't write a whole storage access daemon from scratch. They wrote a library to leverage it in one very specific use case.

//---\\

What I'm seeing listed as a lot of "new" features in Windows 11 are straight up pilfered from Linux. That shiny new interface? The bastard love child of Gnome and Pantheon. The centered tool bar? Gnome. Having access to a tool bar on each monitor? I can think of four DEs that have had that for years off the top of my head.

Oh that magic "update your OS, including new versions, straight from the update manager"? Rolling release distros have existed for decades and been doing it all along. Even semi-rolling release distros like Fedora can, and do, utilize the functionality.

Windows' "new" package manager? Dogshit compared to dnf or pacman. It's about on par with yum from 2003. It's slow, doesn't do deltas with any rapidity, and is feature incomplete to be used in an serious endeavor.

Let's not even talk about the shitshow that is NTFS. That has to be one of the worst "modern" filesystems I have ever seen. No proper snapshotting (and, no, shadow copies really don't count) for example baked in to the FS. They should stop letting ReFS wither on the vine and put in the effort to make it the replacement for NTFS. Or they could do the smart thing, license ZFS from Oracle, and make that the default for a sane filesystem. Better CoW, snapshotting, compression, and self-healing capabilities than any filesystem that Microsoft has ever put out.

Windows is becoming the OS/2 Warp of the modern era. Ideas and technology "borrowed" from other OSes but far less expertly implemented all for the sake of pleasing their fragile. Not Invented Here, ego.

/Might be a wee cranky since I spent from 10am to 2pm with a live Linux USB recovering data from my dad's Surface Pro whose FS decided to shit the bed. What FS was that? Oh, yeah, fucking NTFS. FUCK NTFS!

Mr. Tact wrote on Sep 1, 2021, 10:43:
Truthfully, I don't recall ever hearing of Direct Storage until today. After taking a couple of minutes to read what the heck it is, my response is: Well, if it works as well as claimed it sounds awesome, but given it is being proposed and developed by Microsoft, I think I'll withhold any praise until independent reviews of the finished application are available.

The chance of it being more successful is their competitor already has it, so there is that kind of motivation. But like anything we'll know in time.

This comment was edited on Sep 1, 2021, 12:07.

The Flying Penguin wrote on Sep 1, 2021, 10:59:
It's part of DirectX, which despite being developed by MS, changed modern gaming for the better (sometime, very rarely, they do get it right). Potentially, if implemented properly in games, it will virtually eliminate the need to have long pauses between game 'chapters' where all the assets need to be loaded, to move on to the next section of the game, or long map load times and limited map sizes, for multiplayer.

Yeah, some games do something like that now, using programming tricks, and slight of hand. GTA5 and other open world games, for example, appear to seemlessly load an entire huge world in one go, but they're actually playing a game of 'hide the load' in the background, and disguising it with distance haze. It works, but it has it's limitations. Having something like that baked into Unreal Engine 5 and other engines would, potentially, allow for very new game play flows.

But realistically, this tech is probably years away from showing up in games.

I think realistically we'll see it in the next two years. There's already a few PS5 games doing it with Sony's API. One great thing about the newer consoles has been faster storage and devs are starting to take advantage of it.

Both my old laptop and desktop are still running Windows 7.
But keep up the childish trolling, it’s cute. :-trollbash-:
As for the new laptop it came w/10. No rush to put 11 on it for something that no developer is supporting. 🤷 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Especially more so since 10 will also get the “features.”

It's part of DirectX, which despite being developed by MS, changed modern gaming for the better (sometime, very rarely, they do get it right). Potentially, if implemented properly in games, it will virtually eliminate the need to have long pauses between game 'chapters' where all the assets need to be loaded, to move on to the next section of the game, or long map load times and limited map sizes, for multiplayer.

Yeah, some games do something like that now, using programming tricks, and slight of hand. GTA5 and other open world games, for example, appear to seemlessly load an entire huge world in one go, but they're actually playing a game of 'hide the load' in the background, and disguising it with distance haze. It works, but it has it's limitations. Having something like that baked into Unreal Engine 5 and other engines would, potentially, allow for very new game play flows.

But realistically, this tech is probably years away from showing up in games.

Truthfully, I don't recall ever hearing of Direct Storage until today. After taking a couple of minutes to read what the heck it is, my response is: Well, if it works as well as claimed it sounds awesome, but given it is being proposed and developed by Microsoft, I think I'll withhold any praise until independent reviews of the finished application are available.

I forget who asked but HDR is totally configurable in the display options, you won't be forced into using it.

The Windows Update streamline should also please a lot of people, it was one of the biggest beefs from people around here. Many of whom are oddly now favorable about Windows 10 now that Windows 11 is almost here. Right on schedule as predicted bwhaha.

Windows 10 is going to be supported to 2025 and no one cares when you install it. Go ahead and stick it to the man for a few years or run Linux or whatever.

MS back pedaled on DirectStorage, and it will now be implemented in Win10 - I assume that will be added in a build upgrade not a patch.

MS warned that it will still work better in Win11 since it's built into the kernel, but that sounds like PR speak. If MS wanted to build it into the kernel of Win10, they could easily do it, and I suspect it probably will be, since I can't see any other way to implement it. I suspect it's more to do with the fact that Win11 will have other services better optimized to support it. It'll be interesting to see benchmarks comparing it between the two OSes.

This smells more like the usual practice of MS eliminating or crippling a feature in an older OS to entice users to upgrade to the new one. Remember that one of the biggest reasons power users were urged to upgrade from WinXP to Win7, was MS's decision not to fully support USB 3.0 in WinXP. They could have, they just chose not to.