Talking tech since 2003

I’ve never been a fan of PC manufacturers pre-loading software onto computers that they sell, but it’s always been a way of life in an effort to cut costs and make the money up elsewhere. Not only does that crappy software take up space on your hard drive, most of the time, people never ever use any of it. It’s a waste of resources.

Well, today, I’m going to share with you a brand new way PC makers are wasting resources on computers. The offender? Lenovo. Lenovo’s IdeaPad Yoga 13 comes with a 128GB SSD, which sounds like a decent sized SSD, however, as Walt Mossberg revealed in his review, the computer only has 60GB of space to work with. How is that possible?

Walt writes, “You won’t be able to store much data on the Yoga, however. It is only available with a 128 gigabyte solid-state drive, and, shockingly, only 60 gigabytes of that is available to the user — the rest is occupied by system files.”

Wait, what? Really, how could this be?

Ed Bott, a Windows/tech veteran, decided to try and figure out how a computer with a 128GB SSD could only have 60GB of free space. After a trip to a Best Buy, he shared his findings and they’re quite shocking.

The 128GB SSD is split into seven separate partitions. The partitions are divided as such:

1000 MB (Recovery Partition) — Contains Windows Recovery tools and utilities, that allow you to repair issues with the system drive.

260 MB (EFI System Partition) — Contains system boot files.

1000 MB (OEM Partition) — It’s unsure what, if anything, is stored on this partition.

63.91 GB (Windows 8_OS) — Contains the operating system and is where most users would store files. However, after all the preloaded crapware that Lenovo installs, it only has just over 40GB free.

25.00 GB (LENOVO) — An additional data partition that also houses 1.7GB of driver files.

8.00 GB (unlabeled Primary Partition) — Another mystery partition with no apparent purpose.

20.00 GB (Recovery Partition) — Contains system recovery image that allows users to restore Windows 8 back to its factory settings. Like you would want to? Look at this partition mess.

What is Lenovo doing? I’d love to know why they are subjecting their customers to this mess of partitions that is leaving people with barely any storage space. I should also note that this isn’t the only recent storage debacle that has come to light with Windows hardware, even Microsoft is facing some backlash over the 32GB Surface only providing 16GB of storage space.

PC makers need to get it together, it’s stuff like this that makes it so clear as to why Apple is crushing it right now.

Update 1: We spoke to a source who is close to Lenovo and they informed us that the Yoga 13 is designed to have 80GB of free space, they also went on to say that even with 80GB of free space, that still seems “low.”  We will continue to update the post if we learn anything new.

Update 2: Lenovo has issued a hotfix to fix the partition madness on the Yoga 13.  We have full coverage on the Lenovo hotfix here.

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