If Microsoft designed the world's greatest toaster, it would put full-bore Windows on it and call it the Oxidizing Thermodynamic Energy Transfer Platform for Bread Pro. CNET's Luke Westaway:

Only a third of the available storage on Microsoft's Surface Pro tablet will be available to customers, with hefty software clogging up the upcoming tablet's hard drive. The 64GB model will in fact contain just 23GB of useful space, CNET reports. ... Why do you get so much less space? It seems that Microsoft's built-in software is hogging gigabytes, while a recovery partition is also blamed for taking up hard drive capacity.

40GB! iOS and Android are what, 1GB? It's as if Microsoft just can't see a particular color in the spectrum of business, and the thing killing it is that color. Read the rest

Windows 8's new UI is elegant, minimalist and, for those used to the older versions, utterly baffling. Sean Hollister's lengthy guide to the new OS will have you figuring it out in no time. tl;dr just hover the mouse in the corners. Read the rest

Last weekend, I visited St. Louis and got to catch up with some friends who live in an old brick house in that city's South Grand/Tower Grove neighborhood. (Which is awesome, by the way. After hearing nothing but bad news about St. Louis for years, I was pleasantly surprised by great, thriving neighborhoods like this one.)

There's a little porch off one of the upstairs windows, facing the street. But, at first, it's not entirely clear how you get out onto it. But, whoever built this old house had a clever trick up their sleeve — and it's one I'd never seen in action before. That's a picture of the closed window above. Read the rest

From the Boing Boing DIY costume thread, BB reader NightBrigade says,

My girlfriend and I went out as a Mac and a PC! We actually swapped our preferences so that I could include the "Fatal Error" joke on the PC screen.

From the FT, via Forbes:

The Financial Times reported that, because of security concerns about hacking attacks and viruses, Google has been ending its use of Windows since January.

Google Doesn't Want To Do Windows Anymore Read the rest

During a discussion of Charlie Stross's epic tale of Windows installation, a Making Light reader called Ajay worked up this killer formal structure of "the well-established genre, the tale of godawful Windows-installation woes":

I. Exordium. The narrator introduces himself, establishes his experience in computing (ethos) and exhorts the listeners to gather round.

II. Prolegomenon. Customarily, the hardware spec of the machine is outlined here.

III. Praeinstallatio. The narrator describes his initial attempt to install Windows.

IV. Contrainstallatio. The installation goes wrong.

V. Descendo. The narrator describes his increasingly desperate attempts to get things to go right.

VI. Depilatio. The narrator is reduced to despair and frustration.

VII. Inertio. The narrator sinks into a horrified stupor as his machine gurgles and clunks to itself for anything up to three days.

VIII. Peroratio. The narrator rises into fury as he describes how long and painful an experience the install was;

which may be followed by

IX. Aptenodytes forsteri, the narrator switches to Linux.

Chkdsk red in tooth and claw

(Image: Frustration!, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from basykes' photostream)