Just wondering why vista take so much more room than xp?

Hi I own a A215-S7462 came with vista home pre. preinstalled. Vista was way to slow for me so i found all the drivers i needed for a clean install of xp home, so I did a clean install of xp home then vista came out with sp1 and everything I read said it fixed alot of the junk that was wrong with vista so I reformatted again reinstalled vista. XP home with all the games and other stuff I have uses 13.5 gigs of space on my hard drive. Just vista with sp1 uses 48.5 gigs !!!!!!!!!!!! anyone know why there is such a big difference ????
thanks for you opinion
p.s. seriously thinkin bout returning to xp!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

I've been back and forth myself, on my second XP install after a recent revisit with Vista. My XP "windows" folder is 2.8gig, but I never looked to see what it was in Vista, as my X205 has 2 150gig drives.

Anyway, I can't answer your question, but I imagine a lot of it is due to Vista's Eye Candy, which i turned off anyway. I know some of the features (like the photo slide shows) are much more advanced as well, and likely all of those little "improvements" add up to a lot of space. Also, I don't know if you've taken a look at your paging file and system restore sizes, but those can add up to huge amounts of data.

For what it's worth, XP was much faster than my OEM vista install, but know that I've gone back and forth a few times, I'm not sure that a CLEAN install of Vista isn't pretty comperable with XP, and Vista is a bit prettier in many ways. I'm back on XP now, but this time I can't tell that it's much faster.

 

These is a big difference between a vista and XP install but even a bloated vista install is only about 13gigs.

I suspect you have:
1. a large winsxs folder (4+gb) this is necessary for vista but is massive compared to XP. Its for driver compatibility to combat the old DLLhell of years gone by.
2. Multiple restore points. These can take up a lot of room, make sure you remove all but the most recent.
3. Check your Temp files and the windows\software distribution\download files. these can take up a fair amount of space.

 

There are many factors. All are laid out in this good guide:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=167983

 

and how is vista slow to you, just wonderin because my Vista boot times are all faster than my XP boots. Executing programs/etc i don't see any difference, if anything Vista boots it faster.

 

majority of this 50GB propably states restore points and maybe hibernation file ..

Size of pagefiles.sys ?

 

simply changing the sorting in "my computer" from by-name to by-date takes 10 seconds in Vista....it's instantanious in XP. Boot times are fine, and most programs are fine now (SP1), but certain things that I use regularly are much slower (on my machine) using Vista

 

I decided to go back to xp home its less hassle than vista for me ( checked all the above found no super large files, i keep my sys restore turned off so their was nothing there!) Thanks for your opions!!

 

hmm odd, never had that problem ever with the sort, you prob still have super-index enabled and prefetch too,
Oh well to each their own.