Microsoft is prepared for reduce the size of Windows on tablets with little storage space. In a company blog post, Michael Niehaus, Marketing Director for Windows Business Division, explained how this will be accomplished. The idea is to change the type of installation, going from an image where all the files are present (WIM), to another where they are compressed and when they are extracted when they must be executed (wimboot).
As Niehaus said, from the user experience there will be no difference. If we went to the C: storage, we would see Windows, applications and all user data.
The solution is designed to those computers with 16 GB or 32 GB of memory SSD or EMMC, so they still have enough space for your applications and data.
The procedure could be applied to any version of Windows 8.1 on any device, once the Windows 8.1 Update is installed. And we are not talking about a different operating system, but a different way to install it.
The key is to create a partition for images where the compressed WIM file is taken, as if you were to make a recovery image, in fact, that image will serve for a factory recovery. This will be a read-only file. The rest of the files and data associated with the operating system are stored in the C: normally. The difference is that it will only occupy 3 GB, when before it occupied almost 9 GB.
The processes required to run compressed files have the disadvantage of seeing a performance drop.
At the moment, WIMboot is not supported by all Windows development services, so it would have to be done in a somewhat manual way that Niehaus describes in his post.
A new step for low cost ARM tablets
This WIMboot will only apply to new tablets with space problems. It certainly seems like a new help to Chinese white label manufacturers to be able to offer tablets with Windows RT at a low price. Already in BUILD it was announced that they would not have to pay for licenses as long as they made tablets with less than 9 inches of screen.
There have also been indications that Microsoft is cooking a agreement with MediaTek to provide ARM chips to these manufacturers with the Windows images already created.
Source: Windows blogs