Windows 8 Update: Winter storm Nemo wipes out Microsoft Surface Pro party

Also workers want Microsoft Surface; more storage for Surface

Microsoft had big plans for an exclusive party in New York City to celebrate the availability of its Surface Windows 8 Pro ultrabook, but the ongoing snowstorm named Nemo nixed the event.

Microsoft says it’s canceled the gathering of some selected customers nearby the New York City Best Buy store in Union Square where the devices are scheduled to go on sale at midnight. Even the head of the Surface project for Microsoft, Panos Panay, has backed out, according to All About Microsoft blog by Mary Jo Foley.

Microsoft had to use Best Buy as a venue for the launch because it has shut down its Times Square store, apparently finding that other sites – mostly malls – are a better bet for its retail outlets.

Workers want Surface
Thirty-two percent of workers surveyed by Forrester say they would be interested in getting a Windows Surface tablet for work. Of the same 10,000 polled 26% say they want an iPad, although 12% already had them, the study says. Only 2% had a Surface.

More storage for Surface
Microsoft was widely criticized for labeling its Surface Pro tablets as having 64GB and 128GB of memory when actually a good portion of each model’s disk space was unavailable to users. While admitting that more than a quarter of the 128GB version and nearly a third of the 64GB Surface is unavailable, Panay says things have gotten better.

“Initial reports out regarding available disk space were conservative (eg. 23GB available on 64GB and 83GB available on the 128GB system),” he says in a chat on Reddit, “however our final production units are coming in with 6-7GB additional free space.”

Panay doesn’t explain where that extra space comes from. He also says the reason for a large chunk of that space being tied up is that the devices ship with recovery space allocated by default, leaving customers to free it up if they choose.

8 got game
Valve polls users of its Steam multi-player software platform monthly to find out what operating system they are using and Windows 8 did pretty well, appearing on 8.04% of its community’s machines in January. That’s up 1.71%from December. That’s enough to rank Windows 8 fourth behind other two versions of Windows 7 and Windows XP.

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