Total size of windows 7

[Voo]

3GB is a very conservative estimate as well.

So you tested how large the Win install is after removing all unnecessary drivers and apps? Interesting, you won't mind sharing your results?

 

[frostedflakes]

Win 7 can be relatively frugal if you install it on a small drive. I used to have Win 7 Pro 32-bit on a netbook with 16GB SSD, and I think it only took up like 9GB or so. There are a lot of factors, though. For example, default page file size for Windows is 1.5x the amount of RAM you have. So on a netbook with 1GB RAM, page file was nothing, only 1.5GB. On my desktop with 8GB RAM, though, Windows dedicates a whopping 12GB to page file by default. But if you go through and disable hibernation, reduce page file size, disable or reduce space dedicated to system restore and backup, stuff like that, you can reduce disk usage a fair amount. The base Windows install isn't terribly huge, it's all this other stuff that tends to suck up a lot of space. Also Windows updates will end up using a lot of space as well, I don't think it goes through and manually deletes all the temp files and stuff after installing updates. So manually deleting these after updating should also allow you to free up some space.

The nicer thing, though, is to just buy a fairly large SSD so you don't have to worry too much about running out of space.