Windows 7 consuming 20GB ... why?

Am I the only person who thinks 20GB for an OS is perfectly reasonable?! Typical hard drives these days are 2000-3000GB. Even an inexpensive SSD is 64/128GB. 20GB is not very much for the core piece of software on your system.
 
While I'd want more than 25GB, is it really a problem?
You've got 5GB free and state that you don't run hibernation, swap file or apps on that drive so it shouldn't grow by much, assuming you have your temp and user folders somewhere else.

edit: FWIW my Windows dir using 24.2GB on disk.
 
My Windows partition is sitting at 26GB used so far, and that's only using it for Windows itself and application installs. Games and all other data are on other drives/partitions.

You're going to find that 25GB isn't going to be big enough fairly soon.
 
TheVoice said:
My Windows partition is sitting at 26GB used so far, and that's only using it for Windows itself and application installs. Games and all other data are on other drives/partitions.

You're going to find that 25GB isn't going to be big enough fairly soon.
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Why, you've installed apps on yours, I haven't and my docs redirect to another drive.

So Windows itself needs to be 25GB to cause me issues and from I've read it shouldn't be and if it is, it needs sorting.
 
Ignore reported winsxs sizes. It is wrong.

Many of the files are hardinks and multiple files names actually point back to the same physical file.

It's only a fraction of it's reported size.
 
30GB is the absolute minimum I'd set for W7 x64bit

I'd feel more comfortable setting it as 40GB, or 60 for 'never have to look at it'
 
I think SSDs have raised this issue from the dead. In this day and age nobody should be worrying about filling up their OS partition.
 
Indeed

I whacked cheap 30Gb ssd's into my netbook and media centre. The netbook currently has about 3gb free, the media centre has more like 7gb (no need for hibernate on media centre)
 
Sin_Chase said:
Ignore reported winsxs sizes. It is wrong.

Many of the files are hardinks and multiple files names actually point back to the same physical file.

It's only a fraction of it's reported size.
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There are various explanations regarding WinSxS, but from what I can tell most of it is actually "real" data, and the hardlinks only represent a small proportion of the reported size.

You can check the "true" size of WinSxS on your own system using ctTrueSize - mine is now 8.26 GB in total, of which only 152MB is hardlinks, with the rest being occupied clusters. I've no reason to believe anything about my setup is particularly unusual, although it's always possible I suppose.
 
Sin_Chase said:
Ignore reported winsxs sizes. It is wrong.

Many of the files are hardinks and multiple files names actually point back to the same physical file.

It's only a fraction of it's reported size.
Click to expand...

I can't stand it when people respond with this stock MS reply. The end result is still the same. If you've got a 20GB partition, and WinSxS is reporting it is using 19GB but is only really using 1GB - just try copying some data onto it. You won't be able to. When that partition gets low, you'll still get the same popups and problems with swap file etc.

OP, there is no fix. MS refuse to acknowlege/"fix" it. The fault is because all installed DLLs are copied for their various versions and architectures (hence the dramatic increase in size for x64) to avoid "DLL Hell". A lot of the time this just means the same file can be used. Copying would be a nightmare so they link the file instead - only they use hardlinks. So they might as well have copied them in the first place.

You also cannot relocate the WinSxS folder, nor can you delete any of the files within it without breaking your system.
 
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The thing is the footprint of Win7 relative to the cost of storage isn't actually drastically worse than it was for WinXP 10 years ago.

SSD aside, storage costs around 5p/GB so if you use 20GB for a Windows that is only £1 worth of disk. Whereas WinXP took maybe 2GB but back then looking at my order history for 2002 disk space cost about £1/GB, so arguably a Win7 install these days is half the price (in storage cost) of a WinXP install back in the day.

Obviously when you start talking SSD all bets are off but not really a fair comparison because of the vast performance differential.
 
It's not a fault as such, more a sacrifice for application compatibility. They should have tackled the issue in another way imo.
 
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