Database Info

Installing to Storage Card, Device getting full!

I always install to my storage card but it seems that no matter what i do, my device memory keeps filling up! I ran critically low to 785 KB on a HTC Kaiser. i noticed that the programs put things in /Program Files on my device and on /Storage Card/Program Files
Questions!
In the memory app located in settings it says under the main tab that there is "Storage" and "Program". My "Storage" keeps getting full while my "program" has 39.31 MB free. What is the difference?
Can I simply place all the /program files folders over to my /storage card/program files folder and fix shortcuts or does the programs require to take space on my device itself?
I have NO pictures or videos saved on my device, only storage card, and save all attachments/etc to my storage card aswell. I have reflashed and ran memmaid and no use...

I have tried copying the program files folder over to my storage card. Have 40MB free now but all sorts of broken shortcuts. I have turned off "Shortcut To" in windows via a registry key but when I create shortcuts on the device the pesky "Shortcut to" is still showing. I have decided to flash to the lastest rom and let SAMACHI handle my cab installs...

Other Ideas:
Emails:
I sync my Hermes with a huge Outlook personal folder with lots of emails, tasks and notes. By default, email "bodies" are stored as binary files (*.mpb) in the \Windows\Messaging folder (may vary?). This folder can grow in size up to 10 - 15 MB depending on the number of emails. So in my case it wasn't enough to move the attachments to the Storage Card, I also had to move the emails "bodies" to the Storage Card. You can do this by moving the folder to the Storage Card AND changing the registry as explained in the WIKI (Change the location of email and attachments) to point the new folder location. BUT PLEASE MAKE A BACKUP OF EMAILS AND ATTACHMENTS IF YOU ATTEMPT THIS. Windows stores email headers separate from email "bodies" so if you move the "bodies" and the registry points to the wrong location, you might get empty emails and loose all data permanently if you sync. BE CAREFUL...​Opera 9.5:
If you use Opera 9.5, you will loose another 10 - 12 MB in the \Application Data\Opera9 folder (may vary depending on opera version). In that case is better to run Opera from the Storage Card and tweak it so that its cache is also in the card.​Themes:
Some custom made themes are in the 100 - 500 KB range and if you have many themes in the \Windows folder it can take a couple of megs of storage space. I moved all my themes to the card and keep only the one I use in the \Windows folder.​

You could add more system memory by using a rom that has Ramdisk in it. In case you are not familiar, Ramdisk is a feature that basically uses Program memory as storage memory. It is similar to wm2003 and earlier, with the difference that you cannot manually allocate it. It has to be a hex edit in the rom itself. Now, regarding your question... program memory refers to the ram that is allocated for program use (as its name specifies). Basically, the more programs you have running, the lower this number gets. This is the memory resource of your device. Storage memory acts as your "hard drive", where you will place all your stuff (installation programs, pics, etc) provided that you do not send it to your storage card.
A lot of programs will install to device memory whether you instruct them to go in memory or not. Now, it should be perfectly possible to put the programs in the card as long as you rework the shortcuts...
I don't know which GPS program you are using (if any). But if you are, make sure that it is not downloading data into your device directly (things like maps, POIs, etc).
Try the first part of my post though. That might help you some.
Good luck!

egzthunder1 said:
You could add more system memory by using a rom that has Ramdisk in it........
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I wouldn't recommend doing so though, you want all the ram you can get.... less ram equals less speed. If you have other space (such as your storage card) then use that.
I reccomend one of garmins rom, they usually come loaded with extra space (dk4 comes with like 110mb)
Certain programs have to be installed to the main memory, but if you install to the storage card.... you should only lose a couple kb to shortcuts and such...... something isn't adding up.
PS: The difference between storage and program:
Storage= Hard drive memory
Program= RAM memory
PSS: There is a program called clear temp you may want to try, it gets rid of alot of you temp files for you.

After flashing my device and reinstalling everything to the storage card, I have came to the conclusion that some programs install to the device anyway even if you select Install to Storage Card. I went from 110MB free down to 78mb, all in the program files folder! Time to be moving these and fixing shortcuts!

Weird Problem - Connection Tf101 as camera via usb

Interesting problem, hoping someone can add some info.
I have on occasion transferred files to my transformer via usb cable using the camera mode. The only limitation [I thought] at the time was that it would only give you access to the DCIM and Pictures folders, no big deal, just transfer files to other folders once they transferred.
Then today when I was trying to copy a large amount of data to my TF101 this one [multiple video files], I got an "out of memory error".
When I hit properties on the computer, it is registering those 2 folders on a different partition, with a total size of 4.1GB. Now since the TF does not show this, I am either thinking the base settings reads it and adds it to the system, or most likely it is virtual and a mechanism to simply give access to those 2 folders.
After a bit of trial and error, I found that even if my videos were moved [cut / paste] to a new folder, they were still linked to the other partition. Deleting the videos gave me back space, however I can not get more than 2GB free [of the 4.1].
So either there is an unresolved trash issue, or maybe 2GB was the max size available.
So questions:
1. Can someone [or multiple people] set their TF's to connect to the pc as a camera and do properties and report available space. Obviously interested if people can get the full 4.1 GB
2. If you can get the full 4.1 GB, any ideas how I can clear the 2 GBs of trash data [most likely].

SidereusOne said:
Interesting problem, hoping someone can add some info.
I have on occasion transferred files to my transformer via usb cable using the camera mode. The only limitation [I thought] at the time was that it would only give you access to the DCIM and Pictures folders, no big deal, just transfer files to other folders once they transferred.
Then today when I was trying to copy a large amount of data to my TF101 this one [multiple video files], I got an "out of memory error".
When I hit properties on the computer, it is registering those 2 folders on a different partition, with a total size of 4.1GB. Now since the TF does not show this, I am either thinking the base settings reads it and adds it to the system, or most likely it is virtual and a mechanism to simply give access to those 2 folders.
After a bit of trial and error, I found that even if my videos were moved [cut / paste] to a new folder, they were still linked to the other partition. Deleting the videos gave me back space, however I can not get more than 2GB free [of the 4.1].
So either there is an unresolved trash issue, or maybe 2GB was the max size available.
So questions:
1. Can someone [or multiple people] set their TF's to connect to the pc as a camera and do properties and report available space. Obviously interested if people can get the full 4.1 GB
2. If you can get the full 4.1 GB, any ideas how I can clear the 2 GBs of trash data [most likely].
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Why don't you mount as a portable media player, I can see both internal and external sd cards at 6.8 gb and 14 gb (of 16gb im guessing this is because of read/write file permissions). when mounted as a camera I get 6.8 gb but it doesn't show external storage.

Surface Pro - installing desktop (and Metro) apps on SDXC card

I already found a thread about installing Metro apps to SD card ( http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2079596)
I will also need to install a lot of desktop-mode apps (Office, 3 versions of Visual Studio and 2 versions of SQL Server) and I don't think I will have enough space on 128GB SSD. It currently has 84GB available out of the box with nothing installed. My development desktop PC already uses 100 GB of space on C: and it only has 2 versions of Visual Studio and 1 version of SQL Server.
So I think I will have to install some of the software on 64GB SDXC card.
Does anyone have any experience with that? Will it run much slower? I don't think SQL Server is a good candidate. Neither is Visual Studio most likely. But I think MS Office should be fine, just as some other 3-rd party applications.

You can free up some extra space by creating a recovery USB and then deleting/resizing the recovery partition. This gives a nice little boost to the internal storage on the pro.
Why do you need SQL server on both the desktop and the surface, surely you just need it on one machine? Visual studio or SQL server management tools can then access the desktops settings from the pro anyway.
The SD is far slower than the pro's SSD drive though to answer your original question. But the link you show is for metro apps. These are desktop apps. Visual studio never gave me a choice for what drive to install onto, neither did SQL server. So they appear to be stuck on your C drive anyway. Office I don't own, libre-office does the job fine for me and has a smaller install size while having enough compatibility with my original microsoft office files (although complex documents dont always come out well) and is best of all free.

VS does actually ask where you want to install it, but only a portion (three gigs or so of the whole install) will go there; the rest always goes under Program Files.
Depending on the card, microSD isn't necessarily that much slower than internal storage. I mean, it is slower, but the access latencies and read speed will still be pretty fast (as they are for any Flash storage).

I would recommend removing the recovery partition and deleting windows update downloads. I use A 64gb microsdxc, but that's mostly for holding my multimedia and whatnot. If you really need more space, I'd look into opening up the pro and physically changing it to a bigger drive, which is actually not as difficult as it seems.

RT slow and crashing a lot

Been really frustrated the past few days with the amount of times my surface has become deathly slow/unresponsive and crashes (restarts).
When I say unresponsive or slow I mean when you try left to right swipe to multi task it doesn't do it or the animation is really slow. similarly opening charms bar doesn't work or pressing windows button doesnt do anything.
A lot of times, 90% of the time the only thing I'm using is IE and bing.
Just now crashed/rebooted and saw a message on desktop
Windows created a temporary paging file on your computer because of a problem that occurred with your paging file configuration when you started your computer. The total paging file size for all disk drives may be somewhat larger than the size you specified.
When you click OK it loads Performance Options window and the virtual memory is set to 448 MB
I have never configured this before. What should it be set to?
Getting quite frustrated. Been happy using this device for months now without any such problems.
Right now, I'm pretty much guaranteed a crash or suffer extreme performance issues when loading a single a youtube page. ie becomes unresponsive even after closing the tab swiping up or down may or may not work. tapping windows haptic button doesnt show start screen, pressing lock button does not immediately turn off screen.

448 MB is the same size as the paging file on my Surface RT. In practice, despite heavy use of things like third-party desktop apps and games, I've almost never needed it. I keep a relatively large number of tabs open in IE - it's using 236MB right now, by far the largest of any given program although spread across multiple processes - and have never had the issues you describe, either.
I suspect your Surface may be defective. It's possible that there's some bad RAM - on x86 I'd tell you to run memcheck - or that your Flash memory (SSD) is defective and this is messing up the pagefile. Either one would be covered under warranty.

Are you running low on free space on ssd?

Could possibly be a bum app. I can't recall the app but my RT got very flaky after loading an app from the store and required a wipe to get back to normal.

Yes last night as I was attempting to record the situation with my phone for a youtube post. I noticed I had like 150MB free space. So I immediately removed 2 apps which free'd up about 1GB. It was late and I was mad, and needed to go to bed, but I suspect that was the main problem. And I'll know for sure when I get home from work today.
As I recall the windows folder contained about 7GB and my program data folder also had about 7G, My Documents and downloads is <100MB so that's not anything to worry about, and recycle bin is empty.
32GB is supposed to work out to around 29 something after marketing math right? So then between those two folders, <15GB is utilized and so lets say 4GB for recovery partition (I think its a little less if I remember) that's 19... so where's the other 10?
I am definitely going to delete the backup partition after I make a backup on a usb drive or something. Any other tricks to free up space? Disk clean up is only really good for about 50MB.
I wish there was an app in the market place kind of like TreeSize Free, would be handy for us Surface RT folks.

My device is having absolutely the same issue. Must be a bad update.

The 32GB Surface RT OS install footprint is something like 7GB or so. Add in the recovery partition and you end up with a lot less than 32GB available. This was actually published info (and MS took a beating over it).
Part of the large install footprint is due to things like Office being included. You really can't compare it to Android or iOS, either; Windows RT has things like Powershell and Management Console and tons of other power-user / admin stuff. It's intended to be usable for a lot more than just a platform to launch apps on, which is most of what you get from Android or iOS. Love it or hate it, that's the way it is.
Stick an microSD card in the slot and move anything that can be moved over onto it. Definitely also copy off the recovery partition and then recover the space it was using up.

So as I mentioned last night I removed a couple of apps for 1gb of space. Then I guess there was a system update and now I'm back down to like 500MB. I deleted a couple more apps and somehow I'm down to 400MB.
I'm still getting this ****ty behavior. Not quite as bad as it was, but still not an experience I would recommend to anyone.

RobbieRobski said:
Yes last night as I was attempting to record the situation with my phone for a youtube post. I noticed I had like 150MB free space. So I immediately removed 2 apps which free'd up about 1GB. It was late and I was mad, and needed to go to bed, but I suspect that was the main problem. And I'll know for sure when I get home from work today.
As I recall the windows folder contained about 7GB and my program data folder also had about 7G, My Documents and downloads is <100MB so that's not anything to worry about, and recycle bin is empty.
32GB is supposed to work out to around 29 something after marketing math right? So then between those two folders, <15GB is utilized and so lets say 4GB for recovery partition (I think its a little less if I remember) that's 19... so where's the other 10?
I am definitely going to delete the backup partition after I make a backup on a usb drive or something. Any other tricks to free up space? Disk clean up is only really good for about 50MB.
I wish there was an app in the market place kind of like TreeSize Free, would be handy for us Surface RT folks.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Did you manage to get more space?
As you say, we have 29 GB on SSD. 4 GB is in restore and EFI partitions leaving us with 25GB.
If I select everything in C:/ it takes 12 GB. I have 9 GB free. So I have 25 GB - 12 GB - 9 GB = 4GB of unkown space. The page file is ~2 GB on my surface leaving me with 2 GB of unkown space. If this where a Windows 8 machine I would say that those 2 GB was used for hibernating but I don't think that Windows RT has hibernating enabled.
Maybe Properties in Explorer isn't 100% accurate.
When you used Disk clean, did you also clean System files? Update backups can get large.

wardh said:
Did you manage to get more space?
As you say, we have 29 GB on SSD. 4 GB is in restore and EFI partitions leaving us with 25GB.
If I select everything in C:/ it takes 12 GB. I have 9 GB free. So I have 25 GB - 12 GB - 9 GB = 4GB of unkown space. The page file is ~2 GB on my surface leaving me with 2 GB of unkown space. If this where a Windows 8 machine I would say that those 2 GB was used for hibernating but I don't think that Windows RT has hibernating enabled.
Maybe Properties in Explorer isn't 100% accurate.
When you used Disk clean, did you also clean System files? Update backups can get large.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That 2GB is probably in folders that you don't have read access to by default (Ex. WindowsApps)

If I try to press the button for clean system files, 1GB in error reporting, 500MB temporary files, 400MB windows update cleanup, some other misc stuff so 2.01in total... after cleaning I only had 1.38 free, wtf is up with this math. I already had 450MB free... deleting 2GB should have netted me 2.4GB, not 1.38
I got a message earlier saying it couldn't activate windows, it seemed fix itself.

RobbieRobski said:
If I try to press the button for clean system files, 1GB in error reporting, 500MB temporary files, 400MB windows update cleanup, some other misc stuff so 2.01in total... after cleaning I only had 1.38 free, wtf is up with this math. I already had 450MB free... deleting 2GB should have netted me 2.4GB, not 1.38
I got a message earlier saying it couldn't activate windows, it seemed fix itself.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Didn't Windows reserve more MB to page file?

I have totally 14GB of files ( Including page file and system folders ). However Surface reports that I have only 2GB free instead if 14 ( 28-14=14). I did disk clean-up for all users and I manually cleared some data... I can't even do a refresh because I don't have enough free space.

TwIsTeD78 said:
I have totally 14GB of files ( Including page file and system folders ). However Surface reports that I have only 2GB free instead if 14 ( 28-14=14). I did disk clean-up for all users and I manually cleared some data... I can't even do a refresh because I don't have enough free space.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm guessing that it's because what netham45 said. We don't have read access to folders like WindowsApps. You have some huge games or something like that installed?

I think you need to try "refresh" your Surface. If this happen again then it maybe defected.

wardh said:
I'm guessing that it's because what netham45 said. We don't have read access to folders like WindowsApps. You have some huge games or something like that installed?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Not really. I checked my apps and they are taking around 3.5GB all together. Still I'm missing a lot.
I can't refresh as I don't have free space. Looks like I need to totally reinstall.

Hi, I found 10GB sitting in C:\Users\USER NAME\AppData\Local\Packages\windows_ie_ac_001\AC\INetCache
Seems that clean-up wizard does not clean those.
---------- Post added at 03:20 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:07 PM ----------
I have cleaned up this directory for the two user I have and I gained 13GB free space.

TwIsTeD78 said:
Hi, I found 10GB sitting in C:\Users\USER NAME\AppData\Local\Packages\windows_ie_ac_001\AC\INetCache
Seems that clean-up wizard does not clean those.
---------- Post added at 03:20 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:07 PM ----------
I have cleaned up this directory for the two user I have and I gained 13GB free space.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Did your tablet fine now? Or still slow or crashing?

With 1.48GB free, YouTube is still crashing me and making my tablet unresponsive.
I checked C:\Users\Robert\AppData\Local\Packages\windows_ie_ac_001\AC
Properties on this folder says 4.8 GB. But inside are only 2 folders, Microsoft and Temp, properties for those 2 folders says 3.18MB...
Control Panel> Folder Options> View has show hidden folders enabled
If I type \inetcache it will open the folder for me and properties for all docs in folder shows 1.49G
If I try to del C:\Users\Robert\AppData\Local\Packages\windows_ie_ac_001\AC\INetCache
It prompts yes or no, but then I get access denied.
In the desktop though I could select all and shift delete, to free up MOST of those files. but there's still 2.87GB hidden somewhere when I view properties of the AC folder.
I looked at some of the contents and these folders and its just like thumbails, js files, various cache (obviously as folder name implies)
I've resorted to deleting 2 more infrequently used games, so now I have 2.26GB free... haven't yet removed backup partition.

Files shouldnt cause the tablet to lock up like that, plenty of room left for the page file there.
I think your device is most likely faulty. Vendor should replace.

Wasted space on Shield K1

My shield has 11.95GB of space, not including the system Partition of 4.05GB. Using ES File Explorer, I have determined that I have 6.36GB of files on the tablet. However the system reports that I have used 11.94GB, so cannot download any apps or files. What is using up that remaining 5.59GB and is there any way to recover it?

try to check out with ES Explorer what's using the space or any other "sdcard" analyzer. Hope it helps. I used to use System Tuner Pro, from Developer 3c. Maybe the freeversion includes it.

ninjagospace said:
My shield has 11.95GB of space, not including the system Partition of 4.05GB. Using ES File Explorer, I have determined that I have 6.36GB of files on the tablet. However the system reports that I have used 11.94GB, so cannot download any apps or files. What is using up that remaining 5.59GB and is there any way to recover it?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I had this issue factory reset this will free up the missing gb[emoji106]

Had the same issue on multiple Android devices, it's just Android being Android.
Meaning crap :|
What I do is format the internal storage again (or factory reset but that seems like more of a PITA to me).
Before you format thought select and copy everything from the root directory of your *internal* storage to your *external storage* sd card (or onto your PC).
After you format select all the files you copied and copy back and bingo, storage recovered.
There might be a better way to do this, I'm not an expert.

Have you tried analysing your storage with an app like DiskUsage?:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.diskusage
Sent from my SHIELD Tablet using XDA Free mobile app

Kids, calm down, here's a pro tip:
Since 2.3> Most OEMs started having one partition for Data (App storage) and Internal Storage (<insert your files here>, i.e what pops up when connected to a PC). So what you are seeing are two things sharing one partition. System partition is separate and is usually filled up since it isn't supposed to be touched by the average joe, hence why most OEMs tend to fill it with whatever.
So what 12GB of storage you have free is filled up by downloaded apps and used user space, which is why you see the "internal storage" getting smaller and smaller for each app install. Before all this, Data partition used to be a separate partition being about 1-3 GB. Now this caused a lot of problems when it was quickly filled up, hence why Android/Google(?) decided to merge these two which solved this quite bothersome issue. Moving apps was of course possible around this time but usually only a small portion of the app data was moved into the "internal storage"
tldr: Data and "Internal storage" used to be two separate partitions, and now they're unified and people are confused even if it's been a standard for a few years now.