How much hard disk space does windows 7 actually take up?

[MrMatt]

I'm seeing anywhere between 11 and 40 gigs.....how much does Windows 7 Pro actually take up??

 

[aceO07]

My Windows folder is 9GB. It said it needed 16GB to install though.

 

[pcslookout]

Originally posted by: MrMatt
I'm seeing anywhere between 11 and 40 gigs.....how much does Windows 7 Pro actually take up??

Well a fresh install of Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate, without changing anything at first, took up around 22.1 GB for me. Though that is only because I have 8 GB of ram and for some strange reason Windows 7 and Vista makes your paging file the exact size of how much ram your system has. So if you had 12 GB of ram it would be 12 GB and the default fresh install would take up even more hard drive space. Same with 16 GB of ram and so on. Then by default there is the hibernate file that is enabled on Windows 7 which takes a lot of space as well.

After turning off hibernation and shrinking my paging file from 8 GB to 512 MB my Windows 7 install took up around 8 to 9 GB. You should really be able to set if you want the hibernation file on or off and how large your paging file should be before installation.