Vista, why 6.5GB ??

[enteon]

hi
i'm sorry if this had been discussed before, i didn't find anything.

my question is: why does a fresh vista take up 6.5gb of disk space?
i mean, you need a swap file and a lot of programs in addition.

in comparision to my linux installation, the same amount of space, BUT including all programs and a swap partition, vista seems to be mere junk.

don't want to argue about that :rolleyes:

just wanted to know what all those GB are there for :confused:

[alexanderhuzar]

I think that Enteon makes a valid point and I share his concern. Vista is not THAT much more feature-rich compared to XP, and all those bells and whistles cannot account for tripling the installation size usage especiallty without counting paging and hibernation files.

Currently I am running RAID 0 on a pair of 320 GB drives (596 GB partition), and I have ~100 GB free, but I noticed that at times when I restart my computer, the free space jumps plus/minus 40 GB (sometimes more). At first I thought I had a virus, but then I ran scans and found nothing. Three reinstalls later, I still have the same pattern of free space fluctuation. I have to conclude that this has something to do with System Restore and Volume Shadow Copy. If anyone has a different suggestion I'd love to hear it.

[MikeB12]

wow, my C is over 30gb, base apps, no games, no sys restore.
sp1 increased it quite a bit... V64 Home Prem

but it's consistent, it doesn't jump around that much..
http://img259.imageshack.us/img259/482/67924607qc7.jpg

[enteon]

Vista is not THAT much more feature-rich compared to XP, and all those bells and whistles cannot account for tripling the installation size usage especiallty without counting paging and hibernation files.

yes, i really just meant vista without swap and so on.



when I restart my computer, the free space jumps plus/minus 40 GB (sometimes more). I have to conclude that this has something to do with System Restore and Volume Shadow Copy. If anyone has a different suggestion I'd love to hear it.

wow, _that_ is weird :eek:

system restore is static, isn't it?
what is that shadow copy for? :rolleyes:

i think it may be because of prefetching and superprefetch (sicker version of prefetching).
or it's because of defragmentation of boot files. windows defrag mainly throws big junks of data around, which could lead to the impression that you have less free space. although defragmentation of boot files really improves boot times.

anyway, still don't know what the hell they were thinking to pack 6.5GB on disk :shakes:

PS: please no more comments like "it's far better than XP!". that's not true and i also don't think that the 4gb or so of XP are better.

[alexanderhuzar]

I'll be shocked if you told me that you gained 10-20 megabytes by defragmenting your whole drive, never mind Gigabytes...

I also noticed that for a lot of files (especially DLL's and EXE's), there's several copies of them throughout the drive (expecially in the "winsxs" folder).

[enteon]

I'll be shocked if you told me that you gained 10-20 megabytes by defragmenting your whole drive, never mind Gigabytes...

he has to copy the data prior to "defragmenting" it. ;)
but i'd be shocked if that took 40gb :confused:

the only explanation that i can think of for why vista needs 6.5gb is that they not only kept some parts of old code, but kept EVERY single line of code since 1985 :ROTF:

i'm curious what xsos v3 will weigh...
vista without junk :rolleyes:
maybe i'll get it, don't want to wait for wine to support dx10.
if only there was a good game that looks really better in dx10 :shrug:

[nn_step]

Why don't you find out exactly what is taking up the space
http://windirstat.info/

[dinos22]

i would look into vlite-ing your Vista disk so that you can have a smaller install

[enteon]

that's how i could get the information. :)

seems like noone here has done this before.
but i don't even have vista ;)

if anybody is curious, too, and looks deeper into this, feel free to post what you find out :up:

well, also thanks to anybody else!

[Uberbob102000]

Well that 20-40GB fluctuation is from System Restore and Shadow Copies.. Right click on your OS disk > Click Properties > Click disk cleanup > Click More Options > Click Cleanup for Shadow Copies and System Restore and you should get ~ 30GB back depending on how long you've had it installed.

[blunden]

PS: please no more comments like "it's far better than XP!". that's not true and i also don't think that the 4gb or so of XP are better. For many of us it actually is. A statement like that is pretty stupid. If you don't use it your opinion really isn't interesting to anyone.

About the size of the windows folder increasing after SP1 install... just run vsp1cln.exe. It will remove all duplicate pre-SP1 files that's only needed when you want to uninstall SP1. :)

[alexanderhuzar]

the only explanation that i can think of for why vista needs 6.5gb is that they not only kept some parts of old code, but kept EVERY single line of code since 1985 :ROTF:
There's some merit to this statement. This is also how Microsoft appleals to legacy users who don't feel like upgrading anything other than Windows. Windows 7 (Vienna) is supposed to really clean out a lot of legacy code by running it only when it's needed. (Think DLL files.)

About the size of the windows folder increasing after SP1 install... just run vsp1cln.exe. It will remove all duplicate pre-SP1 files that's only needed when you want to uninstall SP1. :)
Thanks for this.