California Lawyer Claims Microsoft Surface Has Less Storage Than Company Claims

A California lawyer is trying to turn his lawsuit against Microsoft (News - Alert) into a class action after he determined that his new Microsoft Surface has less storage than the company claimed in an ad.

Andrew Sokolowski had purchased a Surface with 32 gigabytes of storage. After adding in music and Word documents, he found he ran out of space.

In fact, about half of the 32GB storage space was taken up by an operating system and pre-installed apps, the lawyer claims.

The 32GB Surface has 16GB of free space, and the 64GB version of 45GB of free space, The AP quoted from the Microsoft website as of Wednesday.

The lawsuit was filed Tuesday in Los Angeles Superior Court. Among its claims are false advertising by Microsoft, according to Law360. The company also is concealing the fact that the operating system is using some 16 GB and that important data is not found in advertising, marketing and promotional materials.

In other recent news about the Microsoft Surface, TMC (News - Alert) CEO Rich Tehrani reported in a recent blog post that the device “needs a patch already” – after just a few weeks on the market. He asks if it is “doomed?”

“I asked the company if users should be concerned about Windows RT as a patch is needed so soon and wondered if they could further elaborate on the security and reliability of the platform,” Tehrani commented. “They weren't immediately available for comment.”

In other news, Forbes reported on Tuesday that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer (News - Alert) recently told the Le Parisien newspaper that its sales “are starting modestly.” He confirmed, too, there were supply shortages of Microsoft’s first tablet, which Microsoft will “fix … quickly,” Forbes said. 

Microsoft hopes to sell a few million of the Surface tablets between July 2012 and July 2013.