
Windows disk space requirements (log-log scale) - luu
https://wh0.github.io/2018/03/15/windows-size.html
======
s5ma6n
Ugh, I felt an itch because of the x-axis ordering. Obviously it jokingly
skips the XP, Me and NT builds because x-axis is only numeric.

~~~
redisman
They do have numeric versions too. This only has XP onwards but proves the
point. [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/windows/win32/sysinfo/opera...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/windows/win32/sysinfo/operating-system-version)

~~~
Avery3R
Windows 10 was 6.4 for a time briefly too.

------
shantly
Does anyone know exactly WTF happened after XP to make the disk space
requirements balloon so much, so fast? I know they started including more
drivers, but, I mean, so does Linux and you can go pretty nuts with driver
modules there and still not move the needle much on disk space requirements.
Certainly not to the tune of gigabytes. New features _definitely_ don't seem
to justify the increase. Even supporting both 32 and 64 bit, that still
doesn't come close to justifying it. Combine Win2k and Win98, double that for
no real reason, double it again for 32 and 64 bit, and you still don't touch
Win7.

~~~
chungy
For compatibility purposes, WinSxS basically contains every version of every
DLL ever shipped with Windows from 95 to present day.

~~~
andai
If only they also included the old UIs...

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
You can make Win7 look like Win95 by turning off all eye candy. Still usable
today if that's your thing.

~~~
Avery3R
Windows 7 is about to be EOL'd. You can enable the classic theme on 10 with
some security descriptor shenanigans
[http://winclassic.boards.net/thread/413/reversibly-enable-
di...](http://winclassic.boards.net/thread/413/reversibly-enable-disable-
classic-powershell)

~~~
andai
Do/have you use(d) this? Any screencaps? :) No classic theme was one of the
deal breakers from me going from 7 to 10.

Worth mentioning here that XP support only really ended last April (POSReady).

7 is supported at least 3 more years:

> Windows 7 ESU include security updates for critical and important issues as
> defined by Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) for a maximum of three
> years after January 14, 2020.

[https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4527878/faq-
about-e...](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4527878/faq-about-
extended-security-updates-for-windows-7)

But MS really doesn't want you to use Windows 7, unless you are an "IT
Professional" :)

------
haecceity
I know this is a joke but Windows has build versions which might work better
than the number marketing name.

~~~
Arainach
They'd work better, but wouldn't be perfect either since they had some
arbitrary jumps. For a long time, release build version numbers were divisible
by 400 - they had to be divisible by 16 for servicing reasons[1], and
divisible for 100 for marketing reasons (to look nice) [2] so build numbers
were divisible by 400 for a long time.

This meant that the final versions had some correlation to how much time had
passed between versions, but it wasn't reliable. For instance, Win7 RTMed on
2009-10-22 as build 7600. Win8 RTMed on 2012-08-01. At one build a day, you'd
expect a build number of 8614....and internally, we were pretty close to that,
but the actual release number was 9200 (so we instantly gained almost 2 years
of build numbers). For the story of why 9200, see [2].

They eventually got rid of both requirements, which is why the latest Windows
release is 18363.

[1]:
[https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160330-00/?p=93...](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160330-00/?p=93223)
[2]: [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-
versions/technet-m...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-
versions/technet-magazine/jj663498\(v=msdn.10\)?redirectedfrom=MSDN)

------
thomaskcr
I have enterprise windows on a domain joined machine and literally gigabytes
of data are devoted to shadow versions of games. Does anyone have a solution
for this? Why is this happening on Enterprise?

[https://imgur.com/PsFySH9](https://imgur.com/PsFySH9)

Windows has been a compliance nightmare with a small team.

Edit: I can't delete these to be clear, even with a local admin and domain
admin account. I saw some solutions online but I need something I can have an
admin create a script and/or gpo for.

~~~
tvanantwerp
I've been dealing with that garbage since migrating my office to Windows 10.
Each update, things would reinstall. Or scripts I used to automated
uninstallation stopped working because they just change the game roster. Or
various GPOs I used no longer worked if you merely had Windows 10 Pro, so I
had to shell out for new Enterprise licenses.

I've really liked some things MS is doing recently, like VS Code. But the
Windows team--I just don't understand what they're doing. They're treating an
OS--an OS that's frequently used for serious business purposes and ought to be
predictable and stable--like some startuppy web app that changes everyday
according to the latest A/B test. It's infuriating.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
> But the Windows team--I just don't understand what they're doing. They're
> treating an OS--an OS that's frequently used for serious business purposes
> and ought to be predictable and stable--like some startuppy web app that
> changes everyday according to the latest A/B test. It's infuriating.

And there's your answer. Microsoft has become infected with these kind of
people and they're fucking up Windows 10. The situation hasn't been fixed
because attention is on more profitable portions of the business like Azure.

------
xg15
Did he really treat the "x" in "x64" as a multiplication operator?

~~~
ninly
[heart-eyes emoji]

------
bluedino
On a more serious note, I wonder what the size of Windows looks like when
compared to the amount of storage you could buy for $200 at each point

~~~
ghaff
The price of storage has pretty much plummeted compared to the size of
Windows. A quick glance at a magazine shows that in 1987, a few years before
Windows 3.0, a 20MB hard drive was about $300 (in 1987 dollars).

~~~
Retric
It depends on what your comparing.

Win 3.0 came out March 1990, which puts HDD at 4$/MB or 50MB for 200$.
[https://jcmit.net/diskprice.htm](https://jcmit.net/diskprice.htm) So 6MB win
3.0 should be ~12% of a hypothetical 200$ disk.

Now HDD prices dropped a lot, but high end PC’s used SSD’s in 2009. A 120GB
SSD cost ~250$ when windows 7 came out, which is ~13% of the drive.

Inflation pushes these further apart, but $200 in 1990 is only $324.15 in
2009.

~~~
ghaff
Fair enough. Though that's probably on the early side for most people to have
put an SSD in their computer. (Inflation also means the 1990 number is also
about 50% higher relative to 2009.)

TBH, I probably spend as much on disk drives as I ever did but that's because
of the redundancy I can afford, all the media, and because I just leave a lot
of stuff laying around because it's easier than pruning.

------
skykooler
> My last post was about either The SSH protocol or The reason you need to
> install a karaoke captioning library if you want to change your desktop
> wallpaper.

I was really hoping for the latter.

~~~
Pete_D
I totally believed that was real until I clicked through to some of the other
last-post links.

> The reason you need to install a karaoke captioning library if you want to
> change your desktop wallpaper

> Why using a can opener backwards doesn’t close the can back up

> Best haircuts for Wi-Fi reception

> Losing weight in 14 minutes a day with PostgreSQL

------
pdimitar
Not sure what to make of this since my gaming machine that I sometimes use for
programming has the C:\Windows directory at ~40GB. This has been the case ever
since I installed the Win10 Beta somewhere in 2015 (okay, it started at about
25GB but grew pretty quickly, over the course of just a few months). I run
both variants of the disk cleaner (user and system) after every update.

Sure the PC is like 9 years old at this point but has seen only a minor amount
of external plug-and-play hardware. I can appreciate all this bloat including
all drivers for all well-known hardware but _damn_ , that's 40GB still.

------
agumonkey
Let's make a project to trim Win10 to 1G of disk usage.

~~~
butz
Back in Windows 98 days there was 98lite project, that allowed to customize
Windows 98 components, even replace explorer.exe with one from Windows 95.
Smallest version was just under 50MB. I wonder how much Windows 10 can be
shrunk? And probably hardest thing of all - keep updates working after that.

~~~
shakna
You've got a few responses spelling out a few ways it can be done.

Almost all of them are based off something called "WinPE" or the Windows
Preinstallation Environment. [0]

This is a similar OS, used when installing your OS. It usually shares the same
kernel, but with everything stripped away, including useful things like the
desktop, etc. You can add some, but not all, of these things back.

As WinPE uses the Fat32 file system by default (you can change it with some
difficulty), most of these installations will be less than 4GB.

Building a WinPE-based environment is a fun weekend project. Totally against
the license agreement to make it into a useable OS, but that shouldn't matter
if you never share it and are just using it to get to grips with how WinPE
works.

[0] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-
hardware/manufactur...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-
hardware/manufacture/desktop/winpe-intro)

~~~
WorldMaker
Microsoft also today has containers and images that they themselves streamline
as much as possible, for certain use cases. The two most common I've seen
referenced:

1\. Windows IoT Core [0] designed for IoT devices and embedded scenarios. The
RPi build of Windows 10 IoT Core is around 800 MBs. (The Raspberry Pi build is
an interesting one to note because you can explore yourself easily in a
weekend project.)

2\. Windows Nano Server [1] is a fascinating Windows 10 build intended for
among other things Docker containerization [2] and virtualization projects.
I've heard some images of Nano server are as small as about 400 MBs. Given its
intent for containerization/virtualization, it's pretty amenable to
experimenting with in weekend projects, too.

Microsoft has seemed quite interested in the last few years with how small and
modular they can make Windows under the hood. It's not always apparent at the
consumer level because of backward compatibility and all of the required
"modules" (like Win32) that folks think of "as Windows".

[0] [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-
download/windows10i...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-
download/windows10iotcore#)!

[1] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-
started/...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-
started/getting-started-with-nano-server)

[2] [https://hub.docker.com/_/microsoft-windows-
nanoserver](https://hub.docker.com/_/microsoft-windows-nanoserver)

------
qwerty456127
Funny, but it still would be more interesting to see the same chart with an x
axis making more sense. Windows 2000 is just a brand name, it's actual version
number is 5.something.

------
anonymfus
Why only 7 has separate x64 point?

~~~
smcl
Right? And Why has Windows 7 got a higher disk space requirement than Windows
8.x (the only time it _actually_ went down over time)

~~~
Kipters
Part of the Windows 8 (8.1 actually) objectives was to reduce the memory and
disk footprint so that cheap tablets could be viable. With WIMBOOT enabled a
full 8.1 install could fit in slightly over 3 GB on certain devices (the
evolution of WIMBOOT is automativally enabled in 10 when the installer sees
fit)

~~~
vorticalbox
Is there anyway to force it to enable?

~~~
Kipters
Looks like it is, but it's not straightforward as a checkbox during
installation: [https://docs.microsoft.com/it-it/windows-
hardware/manufactur...](https://docs.microsoft.com/it-it/windows-
hardware/manufacture/desktop/compact-os?redirectedfrom=MSDN)

------
greggyb
Anyone else notice that this is starting to form a letter 'M'? Perhaps, with
the correct versioning scheme[0] and appropriate install size fluctuations,
they could write out the company name.

[0] Almost definitely _not_ semver.

------
nayuki
Somewhat related to a recently shared post about software bloat:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21929709](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21929709)

------
hydgv
This would actually be interesting if the author wasn't trying to be funny.

~~~
reportgunner
I'm still trying to understand if the author is making fun of Windows or
making fun of himself.

~~~
anoncake
Maybe they're making fun of you for overthinking it.

------
maytc
Looks like the log log size's an upside down W for Windows.

------
amildie
That X-axis is obnoxiously useless.

------
Fnoord
(2018)

------
fizixer
I distinctly remember fresh install of Win 95 taking 73 MiB of disk space
(definitely between 70 and 79 MiB; with a 7 in the front). So I'm not sure
where the 50 MiB number comes from.

Anyone with me on this? (not that it's a huge difference, but still).

ps: Also horrible chart due to x-axis. No offense.

~~~
sp332
50 is the minimum. It could vary quite a bit depending on which features you
chose to install.

~~~
jlg23
And you could still get win95(a) below 30 if you cleaned up manually. I
remember that my setup was 27 and some (small disk, needed space for linux...)

