Window 8.1 Update WIMBoot means 16GB devices will have 12GB free after installing

One of the improvements to Windows 8.1 introduced with Update is reduced hardware requirements (16GB SSD and 1GB of RAM). This wasn’t really talked about that much at BUILD last week with the technical details glossed over. We now have some details of how it’s going to work via the Microsoft Spring Board blog where they have detailed how Microsoft are going to fit Windows 8.1 onto the small devices.

With Windows 8.1 Update Microsoft have a new deployment option called Windows Image Boot (WIMBoot) which installs Windows to a compressed file and doesn’t uncompressed the individual files, so the whole of Windows runs from a compressed file. To the end user it will look like a normal a normal Windows install but you will have 12GB of free same out of 16GB SSD drive where as a standard install would only leave you with 7GB of space.

You are not going to suddenly see loads of additional space on your device after installing Windows 8.1 Update, the changes are for OEM to produce new images for their devices. You can try it out for yourself if you really want to by building your own install images, see Microsoft’s post for details. I am looking forward to seeing what price OEMS can get down to for Windows 8.1 tablets.

Now that Windows 8.1 Update has been released, we want to talk about a new way that Windows 8.1 can be installed on Windows 8 logo-certified devices (since UEFI is a requirement) with smaller disks, e.g. devices with 16GB or 32GB SSDs or eMMC storage, while still ensuring that there is plenty of storage left for apps and data.

This new deployment option, called Windows Image Boot (or WIMBoot), takes a different approach than traditional Windows installations. Instead of extracting all the individual Windows files from an image (WIM) file, they remain compressed in the WIM. But from the user’s perspective, nothing looks any different: You still see a C: volume containing Windows, your apps, and all of your data.

This is supported with all SKUs of Windows 8.1, with the Windows 8.1 Update. (Remember, we’re not talking about a different version of Windows, just a different way of installing it.)