Forget about those pesky closures, Windows 10 has an important message for you
- Reference: 1584957607
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/03/23/ikea_bork/
- Source link:
Today's bork comes from purveyor of flatpack furniture and specialists in cashdesk queuing, IKEA.
No stranger to unhappy digital signage, the homeware giant [1]has form when it comes to not giving Windows 10 enough headroom to install those all-important security updates.
This sign was spotted in the Warrington store by a reader dragged to the land of missing bolts and inexplicable instructions by his partner.
"We may be facing a deadly pandemic," he grumbled, "but apparently that's the perfect time to do home improvement."
Absolutely. While your loyal Vultures are striving to ensure that normal levels of snark are maintained in these trying times, picking up a paintbrush or wielding a screwdriver seems infinitely preferable to contemplating the long, dark teatime of the next few months.
Like many retailers, IKEA had important information to share with its customers. However, Windows 10 clearly decided that updating itself was far more important – if only the retailer would give it just a little more headroom.
El Reg is nothing if not a source of information, and so we can tell you that IKEA was trying to tell shoppers that [2]it was closing its doors from 20 March throughout the UK and Ireland.
Unfortunately for our reader, hopes of dodging home improvement during this difficult time have been dashed by the retailer's online options.
One can but hope that IKEA can use this unexpected downtime to add some much needed storage to its fleet of Windows 10 machines in order to fend off viruses of the digital variety at least. ®
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/18/ikea_bork/
[2] https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/campaigns/coronavirus-covid-19-information-page-pubc8d251f0
Re: The long, dark teatime of the next few months
"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?
"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. 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 ?
Re: "not giving Windows 10 enough headroom"
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.
Re: "not giving Windows 10 enough headroom"
"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"]
Re: "not giving Windows 10 enough headroom"
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.
Re: "Windows has long been the specialist "
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
Not really their fault
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.
Hahaha, yes. 32 Jiggybites and not even an...
... SSD. They had, and have, an eMMC card. AND it's soldered on. Guess what your only alternative is, when the eMMC card is full?
Re: Not really their fault
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]
That's the latest feature update - that tries to reserve 9GB of HD space for future updates!
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:?????
The long, dark teatime of the next few months
There wasn't even any tea in the supermarket the other day. Or milk.
Perhaps Ikea should concentrate on delivering meatballs for the duration.