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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm a happy XP user. XP fits into 1GB and is very very fast.

Windows7 takes 10GB and grows exponentially as it keeps two copies of almost every system file that cannot be deleted.

Only 1GB? In my experience I've needed about 4GB on a modest install.. but then again, that may be including updates and service packs.

Actually I would say 5GB is a more reasonable minimum.

I recently installed an old XP Home CD in a VM with a 4GB disk. The only way I could get enough space for SP3 + updates was to compress the disk.

AFAIK, there is no easy way to resize the primary partition without reinstalling the OS or using third-party partitioning software, so I get by with my 4GB primary and a 2GB secondary for applications.

And I thought my days of running "Disk Cleanup" and manually cleaning out "\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution/Download" were over...

Unlike Windows7, there are many places you can trim WindowsXP, for example you can remove all the backup copies of the service packs it keeps, you will never need to uninstall years-old service packs.

Are you including the swap file in the 4GB, because I am not.

I'm also referring to a clean new install for 1GB vs 10GB

How much does 10GB of HDD space cost these days? I would rather have the OS be able to recover from corruption or deletions than save 5 bucks or something.

5 bucks is way too high. The cheapest drive with 4 eggs on http://forre.st/storage#hdd is is 23gb/$; 10/23 * 100 or 43 cents.

Space on a hard drive is finite, no matter how much it costs, and the size requirement makes it particularly unattractive for running in a VM, compared to a leaner OS.

I run only SSD in my desktop and I was running out of space for VMs. I decided to move a VM to my NAS and I discovered, happily, that it runs great on the NAS, connected over Gig-E. I moved the rest of my VMs over there and I really don't notice a difference in performance.

Too much if you want a one off install like I did this week. When you want a quick VM and one app, why waste more space/time? I know this is not a common usecase, but I was actually wondering - when most apps won't run on XP anymore - what is the minimal-windows going to be?

Also, not sure what you mean by recovering from deletion... How could any system recover from that?

You purchased a Windows XP license simply to run one app?

No, I bought one years ago - it doesn't go bad with time ;)

My SSD system drive is about 40% allocated to Windows. It wouldn't be so bad but the location of many space hogs is not configurable. You just have to live with wasting quite a bit of expensive high performance space, rather than cheap bulk drive space. Performance of the rest of the system suffers, as only critical apps can benefit from being installed on the SSD.

10GB is a low usage ime. Installer directory alone approaches that on my system, much less winsxs.

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