windows OS sizes

[hifijohn]

I am always amazed at the enourmous increase in the size of the windows OS from win95 to the latest.

here are the specs for the actual installs I have made , I know I could have used virtualbox but these are the actual installs on actual computers.these are clean installs without any updates.


the first is the OS name
second is the size of the OS
third is the size of the system32 folder(not for win95 or win98)
the fourth is the number of files in the sysem32 folder
the fifth is the total amount of memory the running apps are using just sitting there and the last is the amount of memory the graph is showing me.(no data for win95/98)

win95-29M-15M-xxx-xxx

win98-218M-110M-xxx-xxx

2000-619M-468M-3.5K-44M-52M

xp-1.3G-1G-5.9K-86M-86M

vista-7.1G-2.4G-15.6K-39M-486M

win7-7.9G-2G-12.1K-32M-486M

win8-7.2G-2G-12.1K-32M-564M

win10-7.1G-12.8K-306M-754M


notes:
win95 was only 29m, its hard to believe an entire os can be only that small I have many programs
that are larger than that.also there is no system32 folder, the 15m is the size of the system folder.

win98 is massive increase in size, over 7 times and the system folder also increases over 7 times.

2000 we see another increase, almost triple, and the system32 folder also more than quadruples in size.
2000 also consumes more ram than the entire size of win95.

xp more than doubles with a doubling of the system32 folder

and now we get to the big guns

vista to win10 all are in the 7 gigs range with system32 folder in the 2gigs range.win10 just sitting there doing nothing uses more ram than the entire win98 OS.

these numbers are for a clean install, after updates the numbers explode for xp they are average 7.7g and vista can easily do 17 gigs! the pagefile.sys on my computer for vista alone is bigger than the original install size, win98 with updates can go over 500M

tiny7- this is hacked copy of win7 it runs at 1.8g and its system32 folder is 1.2g
vienna this post vista pre win7 build its slightly smaller with 1.6g and 1.1g sytem32 folder size

 

[JackMDS]

On the other hand I remember paying $550 for a revolutionary 65MB HD in the time of Win 3.1.

I.e., every thing is part of a "whole picture".

Few black spots on a Picture does not means that the whole Picure is black.

At the moment a 256 GB Good SSD is around $70

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yeah I don't really get how they managed to make it that bloated. Windows 10 does the exact same thing windows 95 did: give you a user interface to run your programs. No idea why it needs to be THAT much bigger in terms of resource usage. Less efficient coding practices maybe? I can see some added features needing a bit more code/memory but not at this extent. Just seems absurd to me.

We've come to a point where hardware is so ahead that it matters less but I remember when XP came out it was so much more bloated than windows 2000 that it ran very slow on most hardware available at the time. Same when Vista came out it was so much more bloated than XP.

Even Linux has grown over time, but even then it's much less bloated than Windows and comes with much more out of the box for most distros. In windows they've actually REMOVED stuff over the years. For example small utilities like Telnet. You have to install those separately from CD or download. It's annoying when you want to troubleshoot someone's system and these basic utilities are not even there by default.

 

[TheRyuu]

Yeah I don't really get how they managed to make it that bloated. Windows 10 does the exact same thing windows 95 did: give you a user interface to run your programs. No idea why it needs to be THAT much bigger in terms of resource usage. Less efficient coding practices maybe? I can see some added features needing a bit more code/memory but not at this extent. Just seems absurd to me.

Well they did have to duplicate a lot of stuff for 32-bit application compatibility considering that it's basically running Windows (32-bit) on Windows (64-bit) so that explains at least some of the increase from XP to Vista.

 

[nerp]

Yeah and why can't a great game fit on a 5.25 inch floppy either!?!? OUTRAGE.

Seriously guys...You can't figure out why an OS released today is bigger than an OS released TWENTY years ago?

Sigh.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

Yeah and why can't a great game fit on a 5.25 inch floppy either!?!? OUTRAGE.

Seriously guys...You can't figure out why an OS released today is bigger than an OS released TWENTY years ago?

Sigh.

Hmm, you just got me thinking about something. Optical media meets flexible digital display technologies to create a 256TB 5.25" optical floppy. :biggrin:

 

[sweenish]

Yeah I don't really get how they managed to make it that bloated. Windows 10 does the exact same thing windows 95 did:

This is just ignorant.

 

[KMFJD]

This is just ignorant.

I thought the post was a sarcastic reply....could be wrong

 

[sm625]

After updating to win 10, my Windows folder is 16.5GB.

 

[sweenish]

I thought the post was a sarcastic reply....could be wrong

Their post history indicates otherwise.

 

[Jaskalas]

I assume it's just drivers and third party bloatware.

The OS acts as an environment, a biome. You're just counting the number and sum size of all the bacteria living within it.