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Comment by shantly | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone know exactly WTF happened after XP to make the disk space requirements balloon so much, so fast? I know they started including more drivers, but, I mean, so does Linux and you can go pretty nuts with driver modules there and still not move the needle much on disk space requirements. Certainly not to the tune of gigabytes. New features definitely don't seem to justify the increase. Even supporting both 32 and 64 bit, that still doesn't come close to justifying it. Combine Win2k and Win98, double that for no real reason, double it again for 32 and 64 bit, and you still don't touch Win7.

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For one thing, Vista onwards includes the entire system on the hard drive, including optional drivers, language packs, features, etc, so you never get the dreaded “Please insert Windows setup disc” prompt. This also makes Windows setup a bit faster as it can for the most part just install one big disk image.

Another factor is 64-bit Windows, which became mainstream with Vista. 64-bit installs include both 64-bit and 32-bit system libraries, so it takes significantly more disk space. This is still the case with Windows 10, which might explain why some low-end devices still have 32-bit pre-installed.

It would be interesting to compare 64-bit XP.

Well, the difference is only like 20%, so 64-bit XP would definitely be much smaller than even 32-bit Vista.

From Vista onwards 256x256 icons are supported and probably included. This might be a reason. Perhaps also more facilities for system recovery.

Think about how many icons it would take to use up say 10GB.

256 x 256 x 3 bytes (24-bit color uncompressed) is ~200K. That's 50,000 icons. So you've only moved the question to why would Windows need 50,000 icons in raw format.

Icon files are uncompressed bitmaps, and in good tradition Windows features 32-bit and 16-bit versions. And Windows contains a lot of icons, just look at shell32.dll or imageres.dll for instance. Still, it is probably part of the reason.

I've never developed a "real" application for Windows, so I didn't know this off the top of my head, but it appears that compressed PNG format has been supported for icons since Vista, which came out in like 2007.

See: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=12473

For compatibility purposes, WinSxS basically contains every version of every DLL ever shipped with Windows from 95 to present day.

That's demonstrably not true. There are a few specific DLLs that have separate versions shipped in the same OS build (like comctl32), but 99% of DLLs have only x86/x64 versions.

Note that I think Windows Explorer(?) wildly overestimates the size of WinSxS due to hardlinks.

Pretty sure this is false.

If only they also included the old UIs...

You can make Win7 look like Win95 by turning off all eye candy. Still usable today if that's your thing.

Windows 7 is about to be EOL'd. You can enable the classic theme on 10 with some security descriptor shenanigans http://winclassic.boards.net/thread/413/reversibly-enable-di...

Do/have you use(d) this? Any screencaps? :) No classic theme was one of the deal breakers from me going from 7 to 10.

Worth mentioning here that XP support only really ended last April (POSReady).

7 is supported at least 3 more years:

> Windows 7 ESU include security updates for critical and important issues as defined by Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) for a maximum of three years after January 14, 2020.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4527878/faq-about-e...

But MS really doesn't want you to use Windows 7, unless you are an "IT Professional" :)

Vista was basically a massive rewrite of a bunch of components, and the devs had more hw resources at their disposal when they did it. One place I can think of taking up more disk space is all of the theme ing and icons. Imagine how many different images are included in windows, those need to be high-res for hidpi now.

Has anyone mentioned

1) recovery partitions

2) Rollback to previous versions data

3) weird things that WIMBoot (Win 8.x) did that meant that any updates were stored outside the compressed image. https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/2a59b58d-9...

I imagine Unicode and i18n haven't helped matters.

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